The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,120
filled the air, and behind her a weary voice said in Russian:
“For Christ’s sake, Kira, are you still here?”
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SEPTEMBER 30, 2017, KATHMANDU
Nima Rita was squatting on his haunches in a backstreet not far from the Bagmati River, where the dead are cremated, and he was sweating in his down jacket, the same one he had worn the last time he saw Luna in the crevasse up on Cho Oyu. He could see her there in front of him; how she had been lying on her stomach with arms spread wide as if she were flying, calling from beyond the world of the living:
“Please, please don’t leave me!”
Her cry sounded the same as Mamsahib’s. She was just as desperate, and the thought of it was unbearable. Nima Rita downed his beer. Not that the alcohol silenced the cries—nothing could—but it did dampen them, and the world would sing a softer tune. Looking down, he saw that he had three bottles left and that was good. He would drink them. And then go back to the hospital to meet Lilian Henderson, who had travelled all the way from the United States to see him, and that was something really big, probably the only thing in ages that had given him hope, although of course he was afraid that she too would end up turning away from him.
He had been struck by a curse. Nobody listened to him now. His words just whirled away, as the ash is blown from the riverside. He was like a disease people shunned. Someone stricken by the plague. Yet he prayed to the gods on the mountain that someone like Lilian would understand. And he knew exactly what he wanted to tell her. He was going to say that he had been wrong, Mamsahib was not a bad person. The bad people were those who had said that she was, Sahib Engelman and Sahib Lindberg, the ones who wanted her dead, who had tricked him and whispered terrible words in his ears. It was they who were evil, not she, that is what he was going to say—but would he be able to? He was ill. He knew that himself.
It was getting muddled, all of it. It felt as if he had not only left Mamsahib to die in the snow but also his Luna, and therefore he had to grieve for and love Mamsahib in the same way that he grieved for and loved Luna, every day, and that made his unhappiness twice as great. A hundred times greater. But he would steel himself and try to distinguish between the voices and not get them all mixed up and risk frightening Lilian, the way he had frightened off the others, and so he drank his beer, quickly and methodically and with his eyes shut. The smell of spices and sweat was all around him. Crowds of people were milling about, but now he could hear footsteps coming very close and he looked up. He saw two men, an older and a younger one. And they said, in English with a British accent:
“We are here to help you.”
“Have to tell Mamsahib Lilian,” he said.
“You’ll have your chance to talk,” they said.
He was not sure what happened after that, only that he found himself in a car on the way to the airport, and that he never did meet Lilian Henderson. Nobody found out what really happened, and it did not matter how many times he prayed to the gods for forgiveness. He was lost.
He would die a doomed man.
* * *
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Catrin Lindås leaned forward and looked Forsell in the eye.
“If Nima wanted to speak to journalists, how come he wasn’t allowed to?”
“It was decided that his condition was too poor.”
“You said that he got lousy care. That he spent most of his time locked up. Why didn’t somebody help him sort out his story?”
Forsell looked down. His lips moved nervously. “Because—”
“—because you didn’t really want him to,” she interrupted, sounding sharper than she had intended. “You didn’t want anything to spoil your happiness, did you?”
“For heaven’s sake,” Kowalski said. “Have some mercy. Johannes is not the villain in this piece and, as we know, his happiness did not last all that long.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry,” she said. “Keep going.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Forsell said. “It’s true that my behaviour was deplorable. I put Nima out of my mind, and I had my hands full dealing with my own life and my work.”