Harbor by John Lindqvist (no david read aloud TXT) 📗

Folke’s reputation, but what was done was done. Anna-Greta had never been one for regrets.

Anyway, the schnapps was decanted into bottles and one of them eventually ended up in Evert Karlsson’s cupboard, where it stands to this day.

The magician

Life could have been perfect for Simon at the beginning of the 1950s. He was in his early thirties, the time when we reap, if we are lucky, what we have sown during our youth. And he was reaping a rich harvest. Success after success.

For a few years he and his wife Marita—under the name ElSimon & Simonita—had been among the most popular artists playing the summer shows in the big parks. For the last couple of summers they had even had to turn down some engagements to avoid double-bookings.

This spring, Simon had found out that they could look forward to the most desirable booking of all for the autumn: the variety show at Stockholm’s Chinese Theatre, for two weeks in October. This would in turn give them the opportunity to ask for higher fees in the parks. Having performed at the Chinese Theatre was a mark of honour in the profession.

Their program wasn’t actually anything special: a little mind-reading, some sleight of hand involving cards, a few tricks with cloths. An unusually quick substitution trunk, plus a version of sawing the lady in half, with the twist that Marita was divided into three sections rather than just two. An escapology feature. Nothing special.

But they did have a particular style on stage. Simon’s measured, concentrated movements and patter set against Marita’s light, whirling steps created a kind of dance that it was difficult to take your eyes off. In addition, Simon was elegant and Marita—well, Marita had glamour.

A weekly magazine had done an at-home-with feature on the couple, and the photographer had found it very difficult to stop taking pictures of Marita—posed beside the armchair, next to the gramophone; holding a lid and gazing ecstatically down into the saucepan.

And so everything should have been wonderful, but it wasn’t. Simon was frankly unhappy and, as so often happens the same thing lay at the root of both his success and his unhappiness: Marita.

Simon had a tendency to brood. This could be very useful when it came to getting to the bottom of something, for example dissecting a conjuring trick so that he could work out how to improve it. Among other things, he was the first to saw the lady in half using a chainsaw. Most illusionists made a big thing of spinning the separated sectionsaround on the stage. Simon had thought it through, and come to the conclusion that it wasn’t the separate parts that were interesting, but the separation itself.

The huge handsaw that was normally used looked like a stage prop. But the raw physicality of a chainsaw, set against his own elegant appearance and Marita’s feather-light frailty—that might possibly achieve the desired effect.

And indeed it was. At one performance a couple of people fainted when Simon started up the big chainsaw. Fortunately there was a reporter in the audience, and it proved to be excellent publicity. This was the result of Simon’s brooding on the question of sawing the lady in half.

Marita was cut from a different cloth. When Simon met her in the mid-1940s, she had been a bright, energetic woman with ambitions to be a dancer, and she moved through the nightclubs of Stockholm like a wisp of smoke.

It was not until a year or so after they joined forces that Simon discovered her secret box. A shoebox containing some twenty Benzedrine inhalers. Simon assumed she was using it as an aid to slimming, and didn’t mention the matter.

But he became vigilant, and soon he could see what she was doing. They might be having a drink, spirits or wine, and he would notice her fiddling with something in her handbag. Eventually one night he grabbed her hand, pulled it out of her bag and found…a strip of paper. He didn’t understand.

By this stage Marita was quite drunk. She began to sneer at him in front of their companions at the table. How blind and stupid he was, and above all how boring. As Marita staggered off in the direction of the ladies’ toilets, someone explained it to Simon: his wife was a drug user.

The strip of paper was what you found if you broke open an inhaler. It was impregnated with Benzedrine, a kind of amphetamine. All you had to do was roll up the strip of paper and swallow it: suddenly you had a spring in your step.

Simon left before Marita came back from the toilet. He went straight home and threw her destructive metal tubes down the rubbish chute. Marita went crazy when she found out what he’d done, but soon calmed down. Far too soon. Simon suspected she was confident she could replace the stash he had thrown away.

It took a few weeks for him to track down her supplier, a former boyfriend who had been a quartermaster in the army. He had stolen from the stores a huge quantity of inhalers meant to keep fatigue at bay during long watches. He had initiated Marita in the use of the drug and its effect on the central nervous system, and had carried on supplying her after their love affair ended.

Simon issued what threats he could muster. The police, a beating, public humiliation. He didn’t know if it would have any effect, but he did his best.

The effect was that Marita’s underhand ways took more dramatic forms. She could disappear for days on end, and refuse to say where she had been. She made it clear to Simon that he could sit and rot in their apartment if he wanted to, but she had a life to live.

She never missed a performance, though. Her disappearances always coincided with a gap between engagements. When it was time for her entrance she was there, sparkling as she always had, tripping lightly on to the stage. It