The Blinded Man

by Arne Dahl

  A faint murmur spread through the room.

  ‘How does it feel to sing in the Maria Magdalena Church?’ Holm asked Nyberg.

  ‘Magnificent acoustics,’ said Nyberg. ‘Missa papae Marcelli.’

  ‘How divine,’ Holm said dreamily.

  ‘What the hell is that on your cheek?’ Chavez demanded of Hjelm.

  ‘A blemish.’ Hjelm had been practising saying that word.

  ‘Yes,’ Hultin said in English into the mobile phone, waving his free hand at the team members. Silence descended over Supreme Central Command. Hultin turned round and stared at the wall as he again said, ‘Yes.’ Then he didn’t say a word for several minutes. Everyone could tell by looking at his back, perhaps from the way it was hunched up and leaning forward, that something had happened. No one spoke. Finally Hultin said, ‘Yes,’ for a third time and put down the mobile phone. At that moment the small fax machine whirred and churned out a piece of paper. Hultin held on to it as the machine released it. He read the message, then closed his eyes for a moment. Something dramatic had happened.

  ‘Viggo Norlander has been crucified,’ he said, his voice failing for a second. ‘The Russian-Estonian mafia nailed him to the floor in an abandoned building in one of Tallinn’s roughest neighbourhoods.’

  Everybody exchanged wide-eyed glances. They were still missing the most important piece of information. Then it came.

  ‘He’s alive,’ said Hultin. ‘That was Superintendent Kalju Laikmaa from the Tallinn police. Norlander apparently set off on a fucking one-man vendetta against the mafia. And he ended up nailed to the floor. Laikmaa had put a tail on him, since he suspected something like this would happen. When his men, the so-called Commando K unit, entered the building, Viggo had been lying there like that for about an hour, with nails through both hands and both feet. Fortunately he was unconscious.

  ‘The nail driven through one of his hands held this message, written in Swedish. I’ll read it to you: “To Detective Inspector Viggo Norlander’s boss, Stockholm. We are the group that you know as Viktor X’s group. We have nothing to do with any murders of businessmen in Stockholm. We prefer to keep more serious crimes of violence within our own borders, as you can see. We’re returning your Lone Avenger to you without even a broken bone. We’ll only put the nails through his flesh.” It’s signed Viktor X, and then there’s a P.S.: “If this is the way you choose to proceed, then we can understand why the case hasn’t been solved. But good luck. It’s in our interest that you solve it quickly.”’

  ‘What in hell was he thinking?’ exclaimed Chavez.

  Hultin shook his head. ‘Clearly he’d picked up a couple of leads. He’s still in a serious condition, but he sent word via Laikmaa that a big Swedish media company, known internationally as GrimeBear Publishing, Inc., has been under heavy pressure from the protection racket of Viktor X and others, and that a couple of the racket’s booze smugglers, by the name of Igor and Igor, are operating in Sweden. Let’s try to get hold of these gentlemen, and check up on what this GrimeBear is all about.’

  Hjelm looked at Nyberg. Nyberg looked at Hjelm. Igor and Igor. They’d already come across those two somewhere.

  Hultin finished his summing-up. ‘Norlander also said that he’s done playing Rambo.’

  Again the team members exchanged glances.

  ‘I didn’t know he’d started,’ said Holm.

  Hjelm drove with Nyberg over to Södermalm, to a small basement pub on Södermannsgatan, and went to the apartment directly above. They’d been there before. They rang the bell twelve times before a man, bleary-eyed with sleep, stuck out his head. Within a tenth of a second he was wide awake at the sight of Gunnar Nyberg.

  ‘Don’t kill me,’ the man said submissively.

  Hjelm thought about Nyberg’s menacing an-assault-is-imminent technique and the deepest bass voice in Missa papae Marcelli in the Maria Magdalena Church.

  ‘Don’t try to suck up to me, Bert,’ said Nyberg. ‘We need a little more information about Igor and Igor. What exactly did you buy from them?’

  ‘I told you last time,’ the voice said faintly from the door opening.

  ‘Tell us again.’

  ‘Estonian vodka, 120-proof, from Liviko. Four shipments at various times last winter.’

  ‘When and how much?’

  ‘The first time was in … November, I think. The last time in early February. I haven’t heard from them since then.’

  ‘Should you have?’

  ‘They came in November, December, January, February. Not in March. Each time I bought a few cases. I knew I could sell it. Besides, you can water it down quite a lot without anyone noticing. It’s become something of a favourite with the regular customers – a bit unusual for a vodka, being Estonian and all. But I’ve run out now, and I haven’t heard from them again. Unfortunately. It was really cheap.’

  ‘You’re going to have to come down to the station with us and help put together some pictures of the Igor brothers,’ said Nyberg.

  The not-very-heroic trio then made their way from Söder to Kungsholmen.

  Hultin tapped on the table a few times and held up two classic police sketches. The one on the right showed a thin man with unmistakably Slavic features and an equally unmistakable Russian moustache. The man on the left was clean-shaven, stout and powerful-looking, not unlike Nyberg.

  ‘These are two of Viktor X’s booze smugglers in Sweden,’ Hultin began his three o’clock meeting. ‘They call themselves Igor and Igor. The photographic composites didn’t turn out too well, so we had to drag out the old sketch artist from the museum corridors. The drawings were made based on information provided by a Mr Bert Gunnarsson, a pub owner in Söder, who has purchased smuggled vodka from them on several occasions both this year and last. I’ve also been in contact again with Kalju Laikmaa in Tallinn. He identified them at once. Neither of them is named Igor. The thin guy is Alexander Bryusov and the fat one is Valery Treplyov. Both are small-time Russian gangsters active in Estonia until six months ago, when they apparently came to Sweden in the employ of Viktor X. The fact that they broke off contact with Gunnarsson in March may have significance.’

  ‘Are we going to accept the damn official explanation for Norlander’s stigmata?’ said Söderstedt.

  ‘Stigmata?’ said Billy Pettersson.

  ‘Wounds that appear in the same places as on the body of the Lord Jesus Christ,’ said Kerstin Holm pedantically.

  ‘That explanation can’t steer the investigation,’ said Hultin. ‘We’re going to have to ignore it, even if we believe it. So let’s try and get hold of these two Igor gentlemen. They’re our only solid link to Viktor X.’

  Time now took on a new form, calmer and more protracted, more methodical. They published the drawings of Igor and Igor in all the newspapers, but with no results. Messieurs Alexander Bryusov and Valery Treplyov remained nothing more than sketches.

  There were several current hypotheses: (1) only Daggfeldt was the intended victim, and the other two were red herrings; (2) only Strand-Julén was the intended victim, and the other two were red herrings; (3) only Carlberger was the intended victim, and the other two were red herrings; (4) Daggfeldt and Strand-Julén were the real targets, and Carlberger was the red herring; (5) Strand-Julén and Carlberger were the real targets, and Daggfeldt was the red herring; (6) Daggfeldt and Carlberger were the real targets, and Strand-Julén was the red herring; and (7) all three were the intended victims.

  Number 6 applied to the newly acquired GrimeBear lead. The media company known abroad as GrimeBear Publishing, Inc., turned out to be none other than the huge, powerful and venerable Lovisedal AB, which evidently was now experiencing mafia problems in the former Soviet Union. Daggfeldt and Carlberger had both been members of the Lovisedal board of directors during the same period, from 1991 until 1993. Strand-Julén was not, and hence he could be the red herring. It was conceivable, for instance, that Daggfeldt and Carlberger were killed because Viktor X wanted to make an example of the
Lovisedal corporation, due to their antipathy to the protection racket in Russia and the Baltics.

  The enormous Lovisedal media factory had expanded beyond Sweden, had started a daily Russian-language business newspaper and was exploring the Baltics, as so many other Swedish companies were doing. The free market intersected with an even freer market, was subjected to daily threats and disruptions, and then to fight the mafia turned to private Russian security services consisting of people who had been trained during the Soviet era. The Swedish companies were financing a minor civil war between ex-Soviet entrepreneurs. Foreign aid, it might be called.

  Chavez followed up on the Lovisedal lead along with the MEMAB lead. This meant that he talked to all the board members from the relevant time periods, then tried to narrow his focus to potential suspects. His efforts didn’t produce much. Hjelm often accompanied him when he had to drive somewhere.

  Hjelm had ended up in a real vacuum. His days seemed to centre mostly on the red blemish on his left cheek. It was growing, slowly but surely. Cilla, who was a nurse, dismissed it with an ambivalent laugh. It was now about three-eighths of an inch across, and he was seriously beginning to consider the fateful word: cancer. Malignant melanoma. But he rejected any suggestion that he have the blemish checked out.

  Kerstin Holm had hardly spoken to Hjelm since their strange conversation in the staff cafeteria. She spent most of her time with her tapes, coordinating them with the interviews of neighbours and employees that she’d assigned to the less-than-pleased Stockholm Criminal Police.

  George Hummelstrand, the foremost opponent of the secession from the Order of Mimir, seemed – contrary to Judge Franzén’s observations – to have quite a sceptical attitude towards the Order of Skidbladnir. In fact, he thought the whole thing was ridiculous. His manner of speaking was much like that of his wife Anna-Clara, sprinkling semi-lewd Gallicisms into the conversation and constantly hinting at remarkable erotic relationships with other women. He kept on emphasising what a ‘Free and French’ relationship he and Anna-Clara enjoyed. At first Holm thought he was trying to seduce her, but she was soon convinced that he must be impotent. It was with relief, but also with some fascination, that she crossed Mr and Mrs Hummelstrand off her agenda.

  Söderstedt, Pettersson and Florén had become more and more immersed in their own world of audit reports and stockbrokers, shell companies, pseudo-businesses, covert dividends and new stock issues. Even when Söderstedt sat down in the cafeteria and talked about convertible promissory notes so that it sounded like a public lecture, he revealed a weariness that was easy to see. Sometimes the finance group would appear at the meetings with diagrams and charts that got progressively less comprehensible and made Hultin’s increasingly messy scribbles on the whiteboard look like a miracle of precision. Söderstedt felt more and more alienated from the obvious enthusiasm exhibited by the two finance officers as they mapped the business affairs of the three wise men, Daggfeldt, Strand-Julén and Carlberger. He wanted to be a cop again. Or at least be able to think.

  Nyberg was burrowing his way like a mole through the underworld. In spite of his carefully devised methodology, he was unable to come up with any results at all. He was the first to have real doubts about the investigation. Either they were doing something fundamentally wrong, or else they were dealing with another Palme murder. Nobody in the murky world of small-time criminals, which was always filled with rumours and gossip, knew the slightest thing, either about the perpetrator or the crimes that had been committed. Both seemed to be far removed from the underworld, in the classic sense of the word. On the other hand, the underworld, in the classic sense of the word, was becoming passé. The truly violent crimes were being committed by other groups, primarily within the institution of the family, which was at the true core of crime in society; the family was the eternal recipient of all the frustrations of adult life. Burglaries were committed almost exclusively by drug addicts, while robberies were carried out by strange paramilitary organisations, often with a racist bent, in order to finance their own operations. Fraud was now an entire division within the service sector, just like any other division. The old small-time crooks stood on the sidelines, looking on and feeling positively honourable. Desperation and frustration were flourishing like never before in a society in which hordes of young people had been shut out of the job market without ever getting even a whiff of it. Nyberg wanted a holiday.

  What Hultin was doing or thinking was just as mysterious as the door through which he entered and exited Supreme Central Command, the door that was always locked if anyone tried to follow him out. When they asked him about it, he merely laughed.

  One evening Chavez and Hjelm slipped out to Stadshagen Field with its artificial turf to catch a glimpse of a match between senior players of the Stockholm police soccer team and the Rågsved Alliance team.

  When Hultin head-butted Chavez’s father and split open his eyebrow, they left.

  Hjelm, who had thrown himself into the 24/7 job to avert the personal crisis he had felt approaching, suddenly had a great deal of free time on his hands. He gazed at his lonely image in the mirror, hating the evergrowing blemish on his cheek.

  Who is this man? he stopped himself from thinking, yet the thought stayed with him.

  By the end of April he was showering a surprising amount of attention on his family. Danne thought it was disgusting, Tova was mostly startled, and as for Cilla – he had no idea what she thought. The strange experience in the kitchen still hovered between them like an untouchable wound. Was it starting to ooze? Was it becoming inflamed?

  In early May the family moved out, at least part-time, to the little cabin that they’d been lucky enough to rent on Dalarö, the island that wasn’t really an island at all, but rather a whole string of islands. Cilla spent almost every night out there, commuting to Huddinge Hospital. Her much-anticipated holiday would begin in June – she would have the whole summer free. The children were also out there at weekends. Danne had evidently decided to hide away from reality during this last summer of his childhood. Paul managed to get a free weekend at the very beginning of May and spent a couple of unusually pleasant days in the spring sunshine, basking in the bosom of his family, and in Cilla’s embrace. The latter took place on a blanket on a deserted pier in the midst of a fiery red sunset, with an empty wine bottle rolling around next to them. She was silent and sad afterwards. Unapproachable. The preposterous beauty of the sunset seemed to have bored its way into her. A deep red layer had spilled across the motionless surface of the sea. The red contours, clearly delineated against the surrounding black, had slowly contracted; an evaporating pool of blood above an abyss. Before long only the abyss remained. Cilla began trembling, a deep, unfathomable shivering. He watched her for a long time through the gathering dusk. He tried to share her experience, tried to see what she saw, feel what she felt. But he couldn’t. The red was gone. Only black remained. He tried to get her to go up to the cabin, but he got no response. He was forced to leave her there on the pier, all alone with an experience of utter solitude. He went inside and climbed into bed, but didn’t sleep all night.

  Early in the morning he went back down to the pier. She was still sitting there, wrapped in the blanket. He returned to the cabin without making his presence known.

  Before the move out to Dalarö nothing much happened, from a professional standpoint. It was the period of working on details and consolidating findings. Besides collaborating with Chavez and Nyberg in both the upper-and the underworld, respectively, he completed two tasks still on his list, the second more important than the first.

  First he called an 071 number and encountered the first phone-sex in his life. In a simpering voice a woman exhibiting some symptoms of dyslexia read from a script what she would do with his penis. Since the aforementioned organ remained completely limp the whole time, it would have been difficult to implement any of these acrobatic manoeuvres. He then called the business registry at the Patent and Registration Office, but the onl
y address for the simpering company JSHB was the post-office box listed in the newspaper ad, a box number in Bromma. So he ended up having to drive over to the post office on Brommaplan and simply wait. He positioned himself so that he could see the post-office boxes through the window and smoked a couple of cigarettes in a sweltering heat more typical of the height of summer than the month of April. Temperatures that had undoubtedly been stolen from July and August. And he waited. He kept box number 1414 in his sights for almost three hours before a short, fox-like man in his forties stuck his key in the slot and opened the box. By that time Hjelm was feeling worn out and had no energy left to tail Johan Stake to see whether his 071 premises actually housed a bordello. Instead, he went up to the man and said, ‘Stake?’

  The man didn’t hesitate for even a second. He slipped past Hjelm and took off fast. Hjelm stuck out his leg and elegantly tripped him, making his face slam into the glass door. Stake fell next to a well-groomed little poodle that was tied up outside. The dog began yapping wildly. Hjelm hauled the man to his feet. Stake had a split lip, and blood was gushing out over the shrieking poodle’s mane.

  ‘So unnecessary,’ said Hjelm as he snapped handcuffs on the man and dragged him over to the car. He hoped Stake wasn’t thinking of bleeding all over his vehicle, just when he’d got it broken in.

  * * *

  Jorge Chavez was present when Hjelm interviewed Johan Stake. They kept things informal by conducting the interview in their office.

  ‘I have a lot of questions about those 071 ads, which in happier times used to cover entire pages of the tabloids,’ said Hjelm, seeming to fumble around a bit. ‘Why do they put the address in the ad? Is that how pimping and bordello operations work nowadays?’

  ‘There are laws about this,’ said Johan Stake belligerently as he touched his taped lip. ‘Don’t you know the laws? What the hell am I doing here, anyway? You have no legal right—’

  ‘Officially you’ve been arrested for resisting an officer.’