Free The Swimmer by Joakim Zander

with her bright blue eyes. Not yielding an inch, a wave of annoyance crashing over her.
    Cyril raised his hands in mock surrender and sat up in bed.
    ‘Okay, okay. If you don’t want to talk about it,’ he muttered, putting on his boxer shorts. ‘I just wanted to show a little interest.’
    They were standing fully dressed down in the living room a few minutes later. A taxi had been ordered. Ready to reenter their normal lives.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Klara said. ‘I didn’t mean to overreact.’
    She reached out her hand and brushed his. Cyril still looked hurt. Offended. Perhaps his mistresses were usually more accommodating.
    ‘No problem,’ he said and ran his hand through his hair. ‘I understand.’
    ‘My family,’ she said.
    Cyril turned to her, attentive, interested.
    ‘My family is easy to describe. It consists of my grandparents, who mean everything in the world to me. Period. And Gabriella, my best friend. I’ve had boyfriends. Shorter relationships. And one that was longer, which, sometimes on dark nights when I can’t sleep, I wish had lasted longer. Is that enough honesty for you?’
    ‘Why didn’t it last longer if you wanted it to? I can’t imagine him leaving you.’
    ‘That,’ Klara began. ‘That we can save for another time. But it was not a happy period in my life. And I was running away. First to London, then here. Later on I guess there wasn’t room for a relationship. And maybe that’s just as well.’
    ‘Your parents?’ Cyril said gently, as if not wanting to risk interrupting her story.
    ‘I don’t have any parents. I ran out of them. My mother died when I was two months old. I have photos of her in an attic closet on Aspöja, but no memories. Nothing at all.’
    She looked directly into his eyes. Her tragic background. Her loneliness and her vulnerability. There was nothing she liked discussing less. The tender looks, the teary eyes that inevitably followed the story of the orphan girl from the archipelago. All that damned understanding and sympathy . It put her at a disadvantage, turned her into someone that she wasn’t, into the person they thought she was.
    But Cyril simply nodded quietly and brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know.’
    He took Klara’s hand in his. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t respond to his caress either.
    ‘I never met my father. I don’t know anything about him other than that he was American and that my mother met him when she was working in Damascus. She was a diplomat. Maybe he was a diplomat. Maybe he was a businessman. Who knows? My mother never discussed it with my grandmother. And then she died in a car bombing in Damascus.’

13
December 19, 2013
    Brussels, Belgium
    The weather went from bad to worse as Mahmoud’s taxi drove away from the EU Quarter toward the Africa Museum in Tervuren, just east of central Brussels. Sheets of sleet whipped against the old Mercedes. It was only five-thirty and already dark—ominous in some way. Mahmoud peered through the window, trying to see the tops of the gray office buildings where European power was assembled. The buildings seemed to continue upward, into the darkness, without end. The taxi crawled forward. Rue Belliard, the European Quarter’s east-west artery, was apparently always in the midst of a traffic jam. At least one of the lanes was closed, and the taxi driver muttered and swore in French. Something about whores and politicians and the relationship between the two, that is if Mahmoud’s rudimentary French hadn’t failed him completely.
    He looked around, out through the taxi’s aquariumlike rear window. Headlights flashed off of the glass facades. In the darkness and the rain, it was impossible to see if any cars were following him. He didn’t think it was likely. His maneuvers in the subway had been so irrational that even a large team of pros would surely have lost him. And a change of taxi after that. He should be safe. Had