The Eye of the Leopard Read Online Free PDF Page B

think it possible to catch fish in the river at this time of year.
    Von Croona. That’s the family’s name. A noble name, he has heard. A family, a name. Not ordinary, like Olofson. The new judge has ancestors reaching back into the mists of historical battlefields.
    Hans decides that because of this the judge’s son must be a really unpleasant devil. He steps out of the bushes and shows himself.
    The boy on the rock regards him with curiosity.
    ‘Are there any fish here?’ he asks.
    Hans shakes his head and decides he ought to hit him. Chase him away from his private rock. But he stops short, because the nobleman is looking him straight in the eye, with absolutely no sign of embarrassment. He reels in his fishing line, pulls the piece of worm off the hook, and stands up.
    ‘Are you the one who lives in the wooden house?’ he asks, and Hans nods.
    And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they fall in together along the path. Hans leads the way, and the nobleman follows a few steps behind. Hans directs and points out things; he knows the paths, the ditches, the rocks. Finally they reach the pontoon bridge that leads over to the People’s Park and then take a short cut across the common until they come to Kyrkogatan. Outside Leander Nilsson’s bakery they stop to watch two dogs mating. At the water tower Hans shows him the spotwhere Rudin the madman set fire to himself a few years earlier, in protest at Head Physician Torstenson’s refusal to admit him to the hospital for his stomach troubles.
    With undisguised pride Hans tries to recount the most hair-raising events that he knows in the town’s history. Rudin wasn’t the only madman.
    He directs their steps towards the church and points out the hollow space in the masonry of the south wall. As recently as the previous year one of the trusted deacons, in a fit of acute crisis of faith, tried to demolish the church one late January evening. With a pick and sledgehammer he resolutely set to work on the thick wall. The commotion naturally prompted the police to be called in, and Constable Bergstrand was forced to button up his winter coat and venture out into the snowstorm to arrest the man.
    Hans tells the story and the nobleman listens.
    From that day on a friendship grows between this ill-matched pair, the nobleman and the son of a woodcutter. Together they surmount the vast differences between them. Not all of them, of course; there is always a no-man’s-land they can never enter together, but they grow as close to each other as possible.
    Sture has his own room up in the attic of the courthouse. A large, bright room, with an abundance of curious equipment, maps, Meccano constructions, and chemicals. There are no toys, only two model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling.
    Sture points to a picture hanging on the wall. Hans sees a bearded man who reminds him of one of the portraits of the old pastors that hang in the church. But Sture explains that this is Leonardo, and he wants to be just like him someday. Inventing new things, creating what people never even imagined they needed …
    Hans listens without fully understanding. But he senses the passion in what he hears, and thinks he recognises in it his own obsessive dream of getting the miserable wooden house to cutits moorings and float away down the river towards the sea he has never yet seen.
    In this attic room they act out their mysterious games. Sture seldom visits Hans at home. The stuffy smell of elkhounds and wet woollens bothers him. He says nothing of this to Hans. Sture has been brought up not to offend anyone unnecessarily; he knows where he belongs and he’s glad he doesn’t have to live in Hans’s world.
    Early that first summer they begin to go on nightly excursions. A ladder raised towards the attic window enables Sture to escape without anyone hearing him, and Hans bribes the elkhounds with bones he has saved and sneaks out the door. In the summer night they stroll through the