The Truth Behind the Lie Read online

  Again she can feel the rain landing on their faces with the wind against them. The detective writes down that Julia was wearing a raincoat.

  “Did anyone else around you have an umbrella?”

  She nods.

  “Some people did.”

  She remembers it now, because she remembers thinking that their umbrellas weren’t much help with rain hanging in the air like it did.

  “About three or four people walking in front of us. And one person covered her head with a Metro newspaper.”

  “And?”

  “She was probably worried about her hair. I think she went into Subway or that Greek place.”

  “Did you notice anyone looking at you? Anyone who slowed down? Anyone who came and went and came back again?”

  She closes her eyes and tries to see the umbrellas in front of her. In her memory, they’re all dark, either dark blue or green, and they are heading in the same direction as they were. The next moment, Julia’s hand slips out of hers.

  “No.”

  * * *

  At Subway, a lone girl is working, wearing an apron and with her hair in a bun.

  “Can we sit down here for a minute?” asks Kouplan, and the girl squints at him with a touch of suspicion.

  “Only if you buy something.”

  Kouplan looks at Pernilla, who looks back at him perplexed. He can’t afford to buy even a single sandwich.

  At last, Pernilla says, “Half a turkey sandwich and a coffee with milk.”

  “Coming up,” the girl says, and turns to the sandwich board.

  * * *

  Most kidnapped children are taken by one of the parents. One of the things Kouplan had read last night, on many of the sites he’d visited. He hoped that Pernilla’s ex was a real bastard who’d been sneaking after them and took her away, because the other alternatives he’d found had been more troubling: extortion, adoption, child labor, murder. He asks about Julia’s father, but Pernilla shakes her head.

  “His name is Patrick. Go ahead and write it down if you want, but I doubt if he has anything to do with this. He ran off after Julia was born and I haven’t heard from him since. I’ve never even asked him for child support.”

  Even though she’s shaking her head, Kouplan asks for Patrick’s last name. Otherwise he wouldn’t really be earning his four hundred an hour.

  “Hey there,” the girl behind the counter says. “Your turkey sub is ready.”

  * * *

  As the girl hands them the turkey sandwich, she gives him an obligatory smile. Kouplan smiles back.

  “Were you working here last Monday?”

  “What do you mean?” She looks at him suspiciously.

  He must smile more broadly.

  “Nothing about you, but I was wondering if you saw a little girl. About so high, wearing a bright pink raincoat. Was she here on Monday?”

  She wrinkles her brow.

  “No, why? Why are you asking?”

  “We’re looking for her.”

  She looks at him as if she doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.

  “Is she missing?”

  The bell on the door rings, and a new customer enters and orders a large sub with extra garlic dressing. Kouplan writes a few numbers on a napkin.

  “This is my cell phone. Call me if you remember anything.”

  The girl’s mouth drops open.

  “Are you a policeman?”

  The new customer turns and stares at Kouplan. It happens so quickly that he doesn’t have time to control his heart: It starts to pound and his legs are ready to run. He stops them by willpower alone and manages to shake his head.

  “No, the police don’t get involved in custody … things. Custody matters. So we’re trying to find her ourselves.”

  Pernilla has gotten up. She casts a glance at the new customer, then looks at Kouplan and the girl, who seems more interested.

  “That’s right,” she says. “The girl is my daughter.”

  Kouplan realizes what an idiotic case he’s agreed to take on. As soon as he asks if someone has seen a missing little girl, he’ll be finding himself talking about the police. Then people will call the police. The police will start hearing rumors and they’re going to start wondering why a dark-skinned man, with a blue jacket and brown shoes, is doing their work. He’ll have to think of something better to say.

  “We’re trying to find her father. He has her now, but he’s moved to an unknown address, that bastard.”

  It works. The girl’s eagerness disappears. The question of a girl in a pink raincoat is now uninteresting. The new customer leans over the counter.

  “Do you have any roast beef?”

  * * *

  Kouplan knows why the entire world is his enemy. He knows why he has to travel cautiously like Jum-Jum in the Country of Faraway, why anyone could be one of knight Kato’s soldiers. But why Pernilla doesn’t want to report this to the police is something she hasn’t told him.

  “Have you had a bad experience with the police?” he asks when they head back out onto Arenavägen again.

  “With the authorities,” she replies.

  Kouplan nods. “Me, too.”

  Pernilla places a bundle of hundred-crown notes in his hand.

  “I’ll need a record of your time and exactly what you’ve done.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “And your name.”

  He hesitates, but what can be more suspicious than a guy with more than one name?

  “Kouplan. K-o-u plus plan.”

  Pernilla looks him right in the eye. Her own are tired, blue, and belong to someone who must have already turned forty. Cried-out eyes.

  “Here you go, Kouplan,” she says and hands him the turkey sandwich, uneaten and still wrapped in its paper. “You’re looking a little thin.”

  CHAPTER 4

  All at once, Julia decided she wanted a dog.

  “Ohhh,” she started to say whenever we looked at cute pictures of dogs on Facebook or met dog owners in the city. My shy kid, who hardly says her name to other kids or adults, becomes fearless; she can run right up to a mastiff or a poodle—my daughter doesn’t discriminate—and begs me to let her pet it. “Can I pet him?” she’d ask me and not the owner, and I’d smile.

  “Ask the owner, not me,” I’d say, but I knew she wouldn’t dare. I’d ask, “May she pet your dog?”

  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. We probably pet fifty dogs that spring, and by the time her sixth birthday rolled around, I’d decided.

  “I’m not bringing you your present in bed,” I declared at breakfast.

  Julia looked up at me, a whipped-cream mustache above her mouth because we always celebrated our birthdays with hot chocolate.

  The accusation on her face, oh, my little rejected six-year-old. And then, her happiness when she realized what was going to happen instead.

  “The dog shelter?”

  I patted her head and smoothed out some knots in her hair before I kissed her on the forehead.

  “It’s a place for dogs who have no owners. You can go pick out a dog there, if you really want a dog.”

  Screams of joy.

  * * *

  I was the one who taught her to be skeptical of other adults, so I really can’t say that her true nature is shy. “Some people you can trust,” I said, whenever we brought it up. And she learned to repeat after me. “And some you can’t.” I hope that she learned which ones were those you can’t trust and I hope that she pulled away and ran for her life. When they took her.

  * * *

  The first dog she saw at the shelter was Janus. He was a shaggy mixed-breed dog as tall as her waist and he had a happy manner that started in his eyes and went all the way to the tip of his tail.

  “Oh, Mamma!”

  I still can see her enraptured face, her light freckles, the way she couldn’t take her eyes from Janus. Even though the dog was still called Challe then. But on the way home, you could see the change in hi
m, how his posture straightened and how calm his curly coat became. He left the shelter as Challe, an ownerless mixed-breed dog, but he got off the bus as Janus, the dog belonging to the Svensson family.

  “Why Janus?” I asked as we rode up the elevator.

  Julia grimaced in that way she had, as she does have, when she’s trying to pull something over on you. She peers through one eye and pulls in her mouth; something is going on inside her original, unique mind.

  “Because we were in a shelter and Jesus took shelter in a manger, but we can’t really call him Jesus, can we?”

  I laughed and then Julia laughed, too. The elevator arrived and Janus sniffed at what would become his floor.

  “All right then,” Julia declared in her inimitable voice as I unlocked our door, “now we have a dog!”

  * * *

  You know how you can feel a certain kind of calm that shows just how stressed you’ve been? I felt more secure after we got Janus. He wasn’t the biggest dog in the world, and he never got angry, but he’s a dog with a sensitive nose and sharp teeth. In the evening, when my big six-year-old had fallen asleep in her bed and I was sitting up in front of the television, Janus would come and put his head on my lap. His loyalty crashed over me like a wave. If anything were to happen to Julia, or me, he would come to our defense. Our brave soldier. That’s when I realized how scared I had been.

  CHAPTER 5

  Kouplan eats his breakfast either before seven or after eight a.m. He ought to eat with the family, that’s what the family says, but he never feels like it. He feels like an intruder, or like they would start to take an interest in him. At five to eight, the mother heads off with both the children, and he waits five more minutes before he opens the door between his space and theirs. He usually stretches his legs then, because their floor space is so much larger than his. He jogs in place and then he does three rounds of pushups and walks around the apartment while his porridge heats up in the microwave. He keeps the lights off, even though it’s started to be dark in the mornings. In just a few months, it will be as dark as coal, and so will the room.

  Before he leaves the apartment today, he puts two hundred crowns on the table with a note. More later, he prints with a style of handwriting he calls Mister Neutral. They used to use one like this in the newsroom back in the day, a handwriting so standardized that it couldn’t be identified as belonging to a specific person. He learned to do the same thing with the Swedish alphabet by studying the posters in the children’s section at the library. You can never be too careful, his brother used to say. Unfortunately, his brother was right about that.

  * * *

  At eight thirty, he uses both keys to lock the door to the family’s house and notes the time in his notebook. Should travel time be part of a detective’s paid hours? He’ll have to do an Internet search on that later, as it wouldn’t be professional to ask his customer what to include in his bill.

  Before he leaves the stairwell, he opens his mouth as wide as possible, then brings his teeth together, opens his mouth again, takes a deep breath, and walks out as a free human being. And wealthy.

  “Youth?” the cashier asks at the kiosk where he’s buying his transit card. She scrutinizes him more carefully than necessary.

  A youth card costs three hundred crowns less than the transit card for adults. You can save a small fortune. However, you have to show your ID to prove your age to any ticket checkers.

  “Adult,” Kouplan replies as the pang of losing three hundred Swedish crowns burns his stomach.

  The beep and the green arrow as he pulls his card through is a relief, an embrace of welcome. Citizen, you are allowed onto the subway! Congratulations!

  Behind him, three or four guys are waiting to sneak through the turnstile. For the next month, he won’t be one of them.

  * * *

  According to Pernilla, Julia’s father was not behind the child’s disappearance. Still, you can’t ignore statistics, so Kouplan changes at Västra Skogen station and takes the subway to Sundbyberg. The best outcome would be never to have to go back to the Globe Arena, ever.

  Patrick Magnusson, the man who never cared about his daughter, works as a freelance accountant. Kouplan found that out just by looking through LinkedIn. On Facebook, he found that the man likes history and through Eniro, the Swedish public tax registry, that he lived with someone named M. Siegrist in a house not far from Sundbyberg’s center. At the house next door, there is an older lady who keeps nude stone angels in her garden. Kouplan can see her blurry figure through the window. Her hair sits like a yellowish white feather duster on top of her head.

  When he rings the bell, she opens the door right away.

  “Hello?” she says as she flutters her eyelashes.

  “Hi,” Kouplan says and makes his body language into a teenager’s. “I’m from Björke School and we’re collecting money for a math field trip.”

  She laughs.

  “A math field trip? And what are you selling?”

  He smiles his broadest smile and thinks about how easily fourteen-year-olds get embarrassed.

  “Nothing, we’re just collecting bottles we can return for the deposit. So if you want to get rid of some bottles, or some aluminum cans…”

  The collecting bottles for deposit idea was number one on a list he made called 2A: Reasons to ring the bell at people’s houses.

  The older lady studies him and tries to figure out if he is a criminal by his appearance.

  “Why don’t you wait here?” she says.

  He waits. After a minute, when she still hasn’t returned (how long does it take to find a couple of bottles anyway?), Kouplan’s thinking speeds up. Perhaps she’s called the police? Does he look like a burglar? How many break-ins have there been in Sundbyberg lately? He should have checked that! The largest angel in the garden is aiming its bow and arrow right at him.

  “Here you go! Not many, but I hope it helps!”

  He swallows. If he is going to go into this profession, he can’t suspect people of calling the police all the time. He just can’t.

  “Thanks so much. It will really help.”

  She starts to shut the door, but he clears his throat and smiles again.

  “I’m just wondering if I should go this way or that.”

  “How so?”

  He winks at her: That often works on women, even those close to sixty.

  “Who do you think has the most bottles?”

  By the blond woman’s answer, he can conclude that the Magnusson-Siegrists are not big beer drinkers and that they don’t have any teenagers in the family, either.

  “Not smaller kids? Or, perhaps, a relative’s kid?”

  She laughs and looks at him strangely. He’s gone too far.

  “It’s getting chilly,” she says as she closes the door.

  * * *

  Since the older woman is keeping an eye on him, he decides to hit the other neighbors before he rings Patrick Magnusson’s door. By then, Kouplan has three full bags of believability.

  “I’m from Björke School,” he says in his fourteen-year-old voice. “We’re collecting bottles to return to get money for a math field trip.”

  Patrick studies him. Patrick is one head taller and he’s blond. Kouplan tries to imagine him with Pernilla. They’d be a real Aryan laundry detergent commercial.

  “Björke School?”

  Kouplan should have checked the names of schools around Sundbyberg before he left. He’d read the name Björke School in a book.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  He peeks into the hall. Adult shoes in two prim rows. An empty dresser and a classic statue with two faces. No children’s shoes, not even a coat hook. No traces of children anywhere. No spills, no mud.

  “A math trip,” he says quickly. “A field trip where we get to do math problems all day. Different subjects. We’re going to Berlin if we get enough money.”

  Kouplan smiles with his sorry-to-disturb-you look, not the charming look for ladies over si
xty.

  “Otherwise, we’re going to Uppsala.”

  Patrick lets him wait in the hall, not outside. Trusts people, Kouplan writes in his notebook. If he stands next to the statue, he can almost see all the way into the kitchen. A narrow vase for flowers balances on a similarly narrow pedestal by the window. In a family with children, like the one he’s staying with, that’d be just asking for trouble.

  He gets five green Carlsberg Hof bottles from Pernilla’s former husband, and two plastic bottles of Loka flavored water. He hasn’t gotten any new information, but at least he’d get nine Swedish crowns in bottles out of it.

  The digital display on the bottle-return machine puts him in high spirits. Sixty-four, sixty-five, sixty-six—the numbers keep ticking up and he still has three bags to go. After Patrick’s house, he kept going down the entire street—because he’s not an idiot—and he found out that people drink a great deal of beer in Sundbyberg. As he starts to put the bottles from the last bag into the machine, he sees someone grinning at him.

  “Good day, huh?” says the slightly smelly Grin, and Kouplan nods, pleased with the nickname he has chosen.

  Kouplan, bottle collector. It’s been a long time since he looked down on himself for doing this, but he still has to remind himself that he’s no longer that person. He is working undercover.

  “Two more and I’d have enough for half an Explorer,” the Grin says with jealousy.

  Kouplan gives him two cans and gets a musty blast of bad breath in thanks.

  “Nice of you. You guys are nice, in spite of what people say.”

  Kouplan doesn’t bother to reply. Still, as the Grin beside him puts in his bottles for money halfway to what he needs for his bottle of Explorer vodka, he starts to think. Who are the people who know where other people disappear?

  “By the way,” he says and acts like one of the Grin’s other pals. “Do you know of a little girl that has gone missing?”