Read Online Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin - Free Book Online

what?”
    Hall sneered. “Aha … now it’s a little more exciting, huh?”
    He looked at her in silence for a long time, and finally she had to look away.
    “Wait a second.”
    The diver got up and disappeared out into the hall. When he came back a few minutes later, he was carrying something that looked like a wine-colored terrycloth towel.
    He placed the bundle on the kitchen table and unrolled it slowly. Deep inside the red lay a bone white cross with an eye: a shape the photographer immediately recognized.
    “That’s one of those ankh-crosses, right?” she said.
    Then she wrinkled her forehead.
    “But isn’t it made of plastic?”
    “Plastic? No, no …” said Erik Hall.
    He held it out to her so that she could feel it. Well, wasn’t it made of plastic? Very light, cast in one piece, like a cheap toy.
    “The key to the underworld, I’ve read,” he said.
    “What?”
    “In Egypt, the ankh was also called Osiris’s key, the key to the underworld. It’s all over the Internet, if you just look.”
    The photographer bit her lip.
    “You’re saying that that plastic ankh was down in the mine?”
    “It’s not a plastic ankh!” the diver hissed. “I found it down there; he was still holding it in his hands.”
    She looked from the diver to the ankh and back again.
    “So that’s your secret?”
    She noticed that the diver swallowed and that his eyes somehow became shinier.
    “Yes, isn’t it fantastic?” said the photographer.
    But she could hear that this didn’t sound very convincing, and the diver didn’t seem to think so, either:
    “I don’t get you journalists. This lends a whole new dimension to everything. What was the ankh doing down there, right?” He placed the object on the towel again and quickly began to wrap it up.
    “I will fucking kill you if you say anything about this.”
    At first the photographer wasn’t really sure if she’d heard correctly, but then came a silence that was so uncomfortable that she rushed to pack up.
    “I t seems like a cool job, though,” the diver ventured when they had gone out to the sunporch.
    “Indeed,” said the photographer.
    She put on her tennis shoes and felt in her jacket to find her car keys.
    “Hey—” he began.
    The photographer turned around in the doorway.
    “Couldn’t we get together in town sometime, just you and me?”
    She smiled quickly, without answering.
    N ot until she had gotten outside the gate to the fence around the yard did she notice that her hand was trembling as she went to unlock the car. But on her way home, when she called the intern, she still couldn’t help telling him about the diver’s latest discovery.

8
Northbound E4
    T he window next to Don’s table was greasy, and the odors of reheated children’s meals, mini-weenies and meatballs, interfered with the taste of his coffee. Perhaps you had to expect such things if you chose to turn off the European highway to go to a motel restaurant, and anyway, life was essentially a
tsore,
a torment, as Bubbe would have said.
    D on had unfolded the printed-out
Dalakuriren
article and placed it beside his tray. He glanced down at the picture of Erik Hall. It wasn’t particularly flattering.
    After their short morning conversation a week or so ago in the makeup room at the television station, Hall had called countless times to remind him of his secret discovery from down in the shaft, and his invitation to the cottage in Falun.
    His muddled calls to Don had come late at night, and there didn’t seem to be any civilized way to get the diver to give up.
    But then
Dalakuriren
had published a whole article about the diver’s secret and disseminated it to tens of thousands of subscribers. At the same time, the person who’d written the article didn’t seemto put much confidence in Hall’s strange story of the found ankh. It appeared to be a cheap trick by someone who just wanted to make himself appear interesting: forced, belated, and false. In the morning, the diver