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had been wiped clean.
    “What address?”
    “Rindögatan.”
    Holt took the sleeping pills out of his pocket, counted them, then counted them again.
    He wondered whether there were enough.
    “Quiet,” Holt whispered. His hands were shaking as he counted the sleeping pills in his hand one more time. Seven. That wasn’t enough.
    “Quiet . . .” he said again, surprised at how loud it sounded.
    The next thing he remembered was kneeling in front of the fountain in the middle of Karlaplan, drinking water out of his hand. He swallowed one, two, three sleeping pills. He stood up, swaying, as if he expected to fall asleep and tumble into the water, drown, disappear forever.
    But nothing happened. He reached for his hip flask in his inside pocket, but it was gone. He swore to himself a couple of times, soaked by the rain falling quietly from the black sky.
    The fountain was turned off, and there were no sounds apart from the faint hiss of the occasional car. Holt didn’t know how he had found the right street, but it didn’t matter. He was now staggering up Rindögatan, he was sure of it. He wandered past his building and headed across the street, spinning around as a taxi came out of nowhere and almost ran him down. He thought he had a girlfriend on the next block with whom he’d spent a few nights the year before. He wished that summer had never come to an end. That he could have stayed and slept with her every single night. That the war could have lasted forever, but that he would no longer have had to be part of it.
    He found the doorbell automatically. The fourth button from the bottom felt like the right one.
    “I want you,” he said when she answered. He didn’t even know if he meant it. In fact, he didn’t mean it. But he repeated the words anyway: “I want you.” He was almost incomprehensible.
    “Come back when you’re sober, Kaj. You’re waking up the whole street.”
    “Well, shit,” he said. He didn’t even remember her name. He laughed at himself. Seconds later, he felt tears welling up in his eyes. He leaned down and felt the contours of the pistol under his pants leg. My little friend, he thought. My little friend.
    “Do you know what time it is? I’m going to call the cops, Kaj. Go home and sleep it off, all right?”
    She hung up.
    Holt leaned against the glass door. A moment later, his shoes were covered with vomit.
    “This can’t be happening,” he said quietly to himself. He sat down on the granite steps, getting the seat of his pants all wet. “Tell me it isn’t true . . . dear God . . .”
    Back at his own building, he looked down at the vomit on his shoes through his tears. “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” he muttered to himself. “It just feels so damn good. Better than it’s ever felt before.” Moving like a sleepwalker, he went up the stairs without even turning on the light in the stairwell.
    The tiny strip of paper he had fastened to the bottom of the front door and the threshold had fallen to the floor in the hall.
    He tripped over his own feet.
    He crawled over to the bed and flopped down on top of the bedspread.
    Nothing was real anymore. Not even the face of the man who stood looking down at him with that indescribably calm expression.
    Finally, Holt thought. Finally you’re here. He couldn’t even manage to say the words to the face hovering above him. What are you doing here? He thought he should have screamed the words, just to scare him off. What are you doing here? His legs felt like they’d been sawed off. He knew the little pistol was down around his ankle somewhere, he could just barely feel it, but he couldn’t get up. The man—the same man with the childish face and the soft features, almost like a girl’s—took the pistol out of his garter. He gave a wry smile as he looked down at Holt.
    “Oh Kaj, oh Kaj,” he said, running his finger over the threading on the muzzle. His accent was hardly noticeable. Holt knew that he had seen