“Everyone is someone else’s Stockholmer, I guess.”

“So what’s your problem, then? Are you worried you wouldn’t be able to cope with the job if you took it?”

Jack rubbed his hands on his pants.

“Are you my psychologist or something?”

“Sounds like you could do with one.”

“Can’t we just focus on the job in hand?”

The negotiator hesitated and took a deep breath before asking: “Does your dad know you’ve been offered another job?”

Jack was about to swear, but the negotiator never got to hear what, because at that moment Jack looked out of the window in the stairwell and saw that his dad was no longer waiting in the street like he’d been told.

“What the hell?!” Jack exclaimed. Then he ended the call and ran.

53

Zara had just stepped out onto the balcony when Jack saw her. That was just after she had told the bank robber out in the hall not to do anything silly, and she needed fresh air, more than ever. If all you saw was the rear view of Zara heading toward the balcony, you’d probably think she was impatient. You needed to see her face to understand that she was feeling fragile. She had surprised herself back there, had lost control, felt things. For anyone else that might perhaps merely have been vaguely uncomfortable, like when you discover you’re starting to share the same taste in music as your parents, or biting into something you think is chocolate but turns out to be liver pâté, but for Zara it unleashed a feeling of complete panic. Was she starting to develop a sense of empathy?

She rubbed her hands carefully with sanitizer, counted the windows of the building on the other side of the street over and over again, tried to take deep breaths. She had been in the apartment too long, these people had shrunk her customary distance, and she wasn’t used to that. Out on the balcony she pressed herself up against the wall of the building so no one down in the street could see her over the railing. She clamped the headphones over her ears and turned the volume up until the shrieking noise of the music drowned out the shrieking noise inside her head. Until the bass was thudding harder than her heart.

And just there, perhaps she found it. A truce with herself.

* * *

She could see winter making itself comfortable across the town. She liked the silence of this time of year, but had never appreciated its smugness. When the snow arrives autumn has already done all the work, taking care of all the leaves and carefully sweeping summer away from people’s memories. All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who’s spent twenty minutes next to a barbecue but has never served a full meal in his life.

She didn’t hear the balcony door open, but she felt a furry ear on her hair as Lennart stepped out and stood beside her. He tapped gently on one of the earphones.

“What?” she snapped.

“Do you smoke?” Lennart asked, because even though he hadn’t managed to remove the rabbit’s head, there was a small hole in the snout that he was fairly certain he’d be able to smoke through.

“Certainly not!” Zara said, putting the headphone back over her ear.

Lennart was surprised, even if that wasn’t visible through the unchanging ambivalence of the rabbit’s head. Zara looked like someone who smoked, not because she liked it so much as to make the air worse for other people. The rabbit tapped on the headphone again and she removed it with the utmost reluctance.

“What are you doing out on the balcony, then?” he wondered.

Zara took a long, hard look at him, starting from his white socks, via his bare legs and his nonelasticated underpants, to his bare torso, where the chest hair had started to go gray.

“Do you really think you’re in any position to question other people’s life choices?” she asked, but didn’t sound anywhere near as annoyed as she had hoped, which was annoying.

He scratched his big, lifeless rabbit’s ears and replied: “I don’t smoke, either, not really. Just at parties. And when I’m being held hostage!”

He laughed, she didn’t. He fell silent. She put the headphone back on her ear, but of course he tapped on it again immediately.

“Can I stand out here with you for a while? I’m worried Roger might hit me again if I go back in there.”

Zara didn’t answer, just put the headphone back in place, and the rabbit tapped on it at once.

“Are you here on safari, then?”

She glared at him in surprise.

“What does that mean?”

“Just an observation. There’s always someone like you at every apartment viewing. Someone who doesn’t want the apartment, but is just curious. On safari. Test-driving a lifestyle. You get to recognize that sort of thing in my job.”

The look in Zara’s eyes was poisonous, but her mouth remained closed. Being seen through isn’t pleasant, you tend to pull your clothes a little tighter when it happens, especially if you’re usually the one who sees through other people. Her instinct was to say something cruel to put a bit of distance between them, but instead she found herself asking: “Aren’t you cold?”

He shook his head and she had to duck to avoid one of his ears. Then he patted his furry face and chuckled: “Nope. They say seventy percent of your body heat gets lost through your head, so seeing as I’m stuck in here, I suppose I’m only losing thirty percent right now.”

That isn’t the sort of thing a man dressed in tight underwear usually boasts about in freezing temperatures, Zara noted. She put the headphones back on again, hoping that would be enough to get rid of him, but even before he tapped on the headphone again she had already guessed that his next sentence was going to start with the word “I.”

“I’m really an actor. This business of disrupting apartment viewings is only a sideline.”

“How interesting,” Zara said in a tone that only the child of a telesales operative would interpret as an invitation to go on talking.

“Times are tough for people in the cultural sector,” the rabbit nodded.

Zara pulled the headphones down around her neck in resignation and snorted.

“So that’s your excuse for exploiting the fact that times are tough for people selling apartments, too? How come you people in the ‘cultural sector’ never think capitalism is any good except when you’re the ones profiting from it?”

It just slipped out, she didn’t really know why. Between his ears she caught a glimpse of the bridge. The ears wavered thoughtfully in the December wind.

“Sorry, but you don’t strike me as the sort of person who feels sorry for people trying to sell apartments,” he said.

Zara snorted again, more angrily.

“I don’t care about sellers or buyers. But I do care about the fact that you don’t seem to appreciate that your ‘sideline’ is manipulating the economic system!”

The rabbit’s head was stuck in a rictus grin while Lennart was thinking hard inside it. Then he said what Zara considered to be the stupidest thing that could ever come out of anyone’s mouth, rabbit or human: “What have I got to do with the economic system?”

Zara massaged her hands. Counted the windows.