Stan walked the darkened streets of Göteborg in a fog of cool salt air, following a long canal east out of the main tourist district and into the first ring of homes. In the car on the way from the airport, he had begun to orient himself with the grid, using the position of the sun to get a sense of the city’s layout. Harbour to the southwest, municipal buildings in the east, houses in concentric rings from the centre to the suburbs. The front desks of hotels always had maps for the taking, and he would spend the short hours before any party, in any new city, studying the streets, delineating neighbourhoods and thumbing through the ads in local newspapers and telephone books for business addresses, marking out his route in his mind.
Such was his science that Stan rarely had any trouble finding a good tavern or local restaurant in any city he visited. He had no interest in hotel bars and recommended tourist spots. His habit was to find the quiet rooms where people were comfortable, where they might even be bored, near where lives were lived and children slept. Since his divorce, a domestic life had to be borrowed, and Stan found most good-sized cities to be generous with these things, if you knew where to look. He preferred streets trimmed with sitting rooms where open windows spilled the sounds of conversation and favourite television shows onto the road. He liked to watch men talk with each other in low-voiced, finger-pointing intimacy.
Past the edge of the deep, black Trädgårdsföreningen Park, the stable squares of downtown began to soften and curve. He walked the broad avenue of Norra Gubberogatan, slowing to watch two young women buy cigarettes from a wall-mounted machine on the edge of a small traffic oval. He stopped behind them and fiddled with the foreign change in his pocket. It was scenes like this he watched for, evidence of the hidden life of a town. The girls smiled at him, took their cigarettes and continued on down the road. Stan watched them turn into a doorway less than a block away. He bought himself a soft package of Kents and walked the short distance to the tavern.
As often happened for Stan in new cities, the evening became a corner table, some sweet dark local beers and his cigarettes. The two girls from the street sat at the bar and talked each other into tears about something lost to him. Wives came to retrieve their husbands and stayed for a short drink themselves before heading home, all arms at elbows and comfortable laughter. Old men in hats played cards. There was a smell of fish and malted vinegar. A newspaper on the next table showed the handsome young Bandol, local hero, in front of the Cup at the airport reception the day before. Stan recognized his own shoulder in the corner of the shot. But for the crazy language and the extreme blondness and beauty of all the women, Sweden had the feel of Canada. If you ignored the age of buildings and looked instead at how people walked down streets, Göteborg might be Thunder Bay. Even in July, you could see boys carrying bundles of hockey sticks, giant gear bags slung over their shoulders.
When the tavern closed for the night, Stan walked the residential streets, observing the turning out of bedroom lights, the soft blue flickering of late-night televisions. An hour before the sun, he made his way to the harbour on the Skeppsbron. There, a small restaurant fed breakfast to fishermen and dockworkers. He ate a cold herring salad and drank more beer. Knowing, obviously, Stan was not a local, the cook tried out his English on him. He talked to Stan about relatives in Sudbury, about watching hockey at the Montreal Forum on a vacation ten years earlier. At sunrise, he poured a shot of vodka for himself and Stan, to toast the day.
Stan made his way back downtown through a morning rush hour of bicycles and fresh blond people walking the sidewalks with purposeful strides. Shops and offices opened, café owners cleaned tabletops in the early sunshine. He reached the hotel in time for the morning shift change. A new young man he’d never seen before was exchanging covered trays outside his room door, loading a still-full dinner tray onto his cart and placing a breakfast plate and coffee urn on the floor. Stan waited for him to wheel the cart down the hallway before trying his key. There was no sound of jazz from behind the door, and no light from underneath. The key stuck in the lock, at first refusing to turn, and he had to stand back and make sure of the number on the door.
He saw the Cup immediately as the shaft of light from the open door hit the bed where it stood, out of its case, gleaming like a child caught in a playful prohibition. Beside it, asleep on Stan’s pillow, lay a young woman. She was curled on her side, one hand beneath her head, the sheet drawn to just below her shoulders, naked. She snored in a light, fluttering kind of way, and her blonde hair fell across her face. The Cup stood upright on the other side of the bed, bobbing slowly to the rhythm of her breathing.
Stan nudged his breakfast and coffee into the room with his shoe, and closed the door. He opened the curtains a crack and examined the Cup in a thin stream of morning light. Nothing had been added or altered and the bowl was empty. There were some fingerprints and hand smudges around the rim of the bowl and at the base, the only remnants of whoever had moved it from the bathtub. They were large fingerprints, male. Stan checked the bathroom next. A small overnight bag leaned in one corner of the counter, a toothbrush, lipstick and mascara beside it on the marble. The shower curtain was drawn just as he’d left it, and no towels had been used.
As quietly as possible, Stan removed his shoes and jacket, reclosed the curtain and stretched himself out on the small couch near the window. He listened to the beautiful snoring of the young woman and slipped into sleep. Less than an hour later he woke to the muted, almost imperceptible sound of bare feet on the carpet and turned his head in time to see a naked young woman glide into the bathroom. She returned wearing his bathrobe, picked up the breakfast tray from the floor and sat with it on her knees on the edge of the bed, smiling at him.
“You are Stanley,” she said in perfect Scandinavian English.
“That’s true,” he responded, sitting upright and rubbing sleep from his eyes. His body ached for the bed and hours more sleep.
“You are not surprised to see me here?” the girl laughed.
Stan looked at her more closely. She could not have been more than twenty and, unlike almost everyone else in the city, she was not a real blonde. Her hair fell golden past her shoulders but it was streaked with dark that pooled at the roots. She let strands of it cover her eyes, and smiled coyly through them. She bit the insides of her mouth, which pushed her lips out in a nervous kissing motion.
“Not so surprised,” he said, trying to return her smile. “The boys think this kind of thing is very funny.”
The girl removed the stainless steel lid from Stan’s breakfast and helped herself to a piece of bacon. She looked at the coffee longingly.
“Please, eat it all,” he said. “I’ve had my breakfast. It would just go to waste.”
“Yes, I am a joke,” she said. “But you ruined the joke because you weren’t here. Oleg told me to stay until you returned. He said you had probably just gone out for a walk. I listened to your music, I ate from your dinner tray, I watched a little television, but then it was so late.”
Her name was Ana, and she was a prostitute, a student at the technical school who paid for her studies with dates. She was from across the water in Copenhagen where she had been raised the youngest of seven children, all boys but her. Her father worked at a brewery, brought his work home with him every night, and her mother had walked away from the house when Ana was nine years old, never to return. Ana assumed her mother was dead.
“Otherwise, how is it possible?” she said. “I have always thought she fell into a canal. It happens, people fall into canals and they are gone.”
All this Stan learned in the first half-hour he spent with the beautiful young woman he had found sleeping in his bed. Ana had built her young professional reputation on a skill for massage and that irresistible nervous habit of biting the inside of her mouth. She worked all the downtown hotels and had a very regular clientele of visiting Danish businessmen and local politicians. Her specialty was something she called the knee massage. With the client face down on the bed, she would remove all her clothing, spread oil across the client’s back, her own