phoenix rising from the ashes of a vase smashed a thousand years ago. She needed knowledge and patience in order to succeed, and not be too frustrated by the recalcitrant bits that refused to fit into the puzzle. But what should she do now? How would she be able to glue together the shards Henrik had left behind?
Over and over again during the night she burst out crying. Or was it that she had been crying all the time, without noticing that the tears occasionally dried up? She read through all the confusing documents that Henrik had collected, most of them in English, some of them photocopies of extracts from books or archives, others emails from university libraries or private foundations.
As dawn broke and she felt incapable of reading any more, she stretched out on the bed and tried to sum up the most important things she had read.
In November 1963, round about midday, Central Time, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot while travelling with his wife in a motorcade through the centre of Dallas. Three shots were fired from a rifle. Bullets had hurtled forth at mind-boggling speed and transformed everything in their path into a bloody mash of flesh and sinew and bone. The first shot hit the president in his throat, the second one missed, but the third hit him in the head and created a large hole through which lumps of his brain were blown out with enormous force. The president's body was flown back to Washington that same day in Air Force One. On board the flight, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president: by his side was Jackie, still in her bloodstained clothes. A post-mortem examination of the president was carried out at an air force base. The whole procedure was veiled in secrecy, and nobody knows what actually happened. Many years later, it was established that what remained of Kennedy's brain after the shot and the subsequent post-mortem had disappeared. Several investigations attempted to find out what had happened to the missing organ, but it proved impossible to establish the facts. The probability was that Robert Kennedy, the dead president's brother, had the remains buried. But nobody knew for sure. And a few years later, Robert Kennedy was also murdered.
President J. F. Kennedy's brain disappeared, and its location is still unknown.
Louise lay in her bed with her eyes closed and tried to understand. What had Henrik been looking for? She thought through the marginal notes he had made in the various documents.
The dead president's brain is like a hard drive. Was somebody afraid that it would become possible to decode the brain, just as it is possible to dig down into the cellars of a hard drive and retrieve imprints of texts that really ought to have been erased?
Henrik did not answer his own question.
She lay on her side in bed and studied a painting on the wall next to the bathroom door. Three tulips in a beige vase. The table dark brown, the cloth white. A bad painting, she thought. It doesn't breathe, the flowers don't produce any perfume.
In one of the files Henrik had inserted a full page torn out of a notebook on which he had tried to answer the question about why the brain might have disappeared.
Fear of what it contains, of the possibility that it might become possible to extract the innermost thoughts of a dead man. Like safe cracking or stealing diaries from somebody's most intimate hiding place. Is it possible to penetrate any deeper into a person's private world than by stealing his thoughts?
Louise could not understand who was afraid, or of what. What does Henrik think the dead president can tell him? A story that came to an end a long time ago? What exactly is this story Henrik is searching for?
I must be on the wrong track, she thought. She sat up in bed and felt for the piece of paper on which he had made notes. She could see he had been writing quickly. The wording was careless, the punctuation haphazard, and there were a lot of crossings-out. She also thought she could detect that he had not been resting the paper on something solid, possibly just his knee. He had written down the word trophy. He continued: A scalp can be the ultimate prize, just like the antlers of a deer or the skin of a lion. So why couldn't a brain be a trophy? In that case, who is the