The procession flowed through the center of town. The Goddess of Light was at the front, on a float. It’s like a catafalque, thought Winter, observing from his living room window. Habakkuk’s daughter. The procession wriggled like a glowworm down below in the early evening, continued eastward over the crossroads. The mass of spectators was a black sea, filling all the streets and choking all the buildings.

Not everybody has booked into the Empire State Building, not everybody is flying back and forth over the lines of longitude in order to fool time. We are having a nice, peaceful time here and we can smell the flowers, he thought as one of the floats passed by under his window: a gigantic bouquet of flowers made of wood, or whatever it was, chipboard, surrounded by living flowers.

He felt Angela’s hand on his shoulder.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go out?” he asked.

“Absolutely certain,” she said, sniffing at the long-stemmed rose he’d given her a few minutes before. “We’re having a nice, peaceful time here and we can smell the flowers.”

“All the rest of Gothenburg is down there,” he said.

The phone rang. His mother answered in the hall.

“Erik, it’s for you,” she shouted.

Angela looked at him.

He took the couple of strides necessary to get to the living room phone.

“Hello… er… It’s Patrik.”

“Hello, Patrik. How are things?”

“Er… all right, I guess.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m around at Ria’s place. What do you want?”

“You were trying to get hold of me yesterday.”

“Oh, it was nothing. I had an idea, that’s all.”

“Tell me what it was, then.”

“Well… er… that guy who came down in the elevator. You know, in that building where the mur-”

“I’m with you, Patrik.”

“I think he was wearing a uniform.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Under his overcoat, I mean.”

“Why do you think he was wearing a uniform?”

“I dunno, it just looked like that.”

“What kind of a uniform?”

“Well, it was sort of… with things on. Dark blue… with things on, maybe his shirt was light blue, and his overcoat sort of opened up a bit… when he went out of the door and there was a flash of something sort of gold on his shirt. In front of it.”

“You sound as if you’re describing a police uniform, Patrik.”

“Yes, well.”

“Did you think of a police uniform?”

“Not then.”

“Now, though?”

“Maybe.”

“Anything else?”

“What?”

“Did you see anything else that could be part of a uniform?”

“Well… it could have been a belt or a strap, but I’m not sure if I saw that.”

“What about his head? Now that you’ve had time to think. Did he have anything on his head?”

Winter watched the tail end of the procession wriggling away toward the Avenue. A snake. It looked like a snake now, thinner at the tail end, wriggling from side to side and followed by the black mass filling the street and the park.

Angela was still standing at the window, rose in hand. It sounded as if his mother was filling the shaker with ice in the kitchen. Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny were playing “Message to a Friend” at low volume.

“He didn’t have anything on his head,” Patrik said.

“All right.”

“There is one thing… I’ve thought about it a lot.”

Winter waited, said nothing. His mother looked into the room. Angela gave her a smile.

“I think I’ve seen him somewhere else,” Patrik said.

Bartram followed the procession at a distance, taking parallel streets and giving way to the crowds of people who seemed to be getting forced back from the center of activities.

He waited at the corner. The Goddess had turned left and was coming toward him. There were twice as many people as usually turn out for special festivities.

Some people near him were singing. Others were hugging one another with sudden, jerky movements. Everything was so tremendously big. The newspapers had almost killed themselves in their efforts to outdo each other in hyping the millennium. The television was even worse.

Nobody thought any longer that all things electronic would break down. Everything would work just as badly as usual, he thought. The trams would continue not running. People would still get furious. People would still spit at him.

He continued northward. The procession began to close up as it approached its destination at Lilla Bommen. There were still a few idiots who hadn’t caught on to what was happening, standing by their cars on the road, ringed in for the evening, and indeed the night, by the cheering crowds.

People were keeping an eye on the sky over the river, waiting. It had grown cold again, and people’s breath formed clouds that slowly rose and grew denser. That could start it raining, thought Bartram, but the mist dispersed higher up and suddenly the sky over Hisingen exploded. Two thousand years of pyrotechnical skills came to a climax. It started with a fan of gold that covered the whole province.

Winter was in the kitchen preparing the New Year’s dinner. He could hear his mother’s and Angela’s voices in the living room. He took a sip of the champagne he’d served earlier. Dry and light. The best champagne should be served early in the evening. Angela had sniffed at it, then drunk a little of the best table water on the market. Patrik was an observant boy and he was always strolling around town. Half a million people lived in Gothenburg, and that wasn’t all that many. You kept seeing faces. Once, twice, three times.

They could talk to him after the holiday. It was an opening, possibly a beam of light.

He decided to concentrate on the first course. The fish stock was ready and strained. It had been simmering for four hours the previous night, and had been made with fish bones, a leek, shallots, fresh ginger, white peppercorns, and water.

He mixed the dressing and put it to one side: the stock, fresh lime juice, grated horseradish, sea salt, and a little freshly ground black pepper.

He carefully stirred a teaspoon of freshly ground, unrefined sugar and half a teaspoon of sesame oil into three eggs, then fried thin omelets in a little rapeseed oil before letting them cool on top of one another. Then he rolled each of the omelets and cut the rolls into thin slices and put them on one side.

He had just finished opening the oysters, two and a half dozen. He checked them again, then cut twenty-five rinsed sugar snap pea pods diagonally and blanched them in boiling water for thirty seconds before cooling them with cold water. Having drained them, he mixed them in a large bowl with finely chopped red onion, a little watercress, and some leaves of a lettuce known as upland cress that had a delicate, slightly hot, peppery taste. Finally he added the thin slices of omelet.

He heated up some more oil in a deep frying pan and sautéed the oysters very quickly on both sides at a high heat. He repeated this several times, then placed them on top of the salad, one by one. When he had finished, he drizzled over the dressing. He carefully tossed the oyster salad, divided it onto three plates, endeavoring to be as fair as possible in distributing the oysters.

He thought that should keep them going until the more substantial course, which was rack of veal with mashed garlic potato and pesto. The meat had started to turn brown and interesting smells were coming from the oven. It was spiced with coarsely chopped cloves of garlic, newly ground black pepper, and olive oil-he’d put the ingredients into the mixer and turned them into a paste, then rubbed it into the veal and allowed it to marinate for five hours.

For Morelius, Gothenburg was like a sea of fire. No. It was the sky that was a sea of fire, constantly shifting shades of red, never still. The official fireworks display had been followed by the unofficial ones, everybody competing with everybody else. He’d heard that five or six people had had accidents with rockets already, and it wasn’t midnight yet. You could hear ambulance sirens occasionally, but as far as he knew, nobody had died so far.