The Blinded Man

by Arne Dahl

  ‘I know somebody, a fellow Chilean.’ Chavez mentioned his country of origin for the first time. ‘He’s a real experto on unusual jazz recordings. He has a little record shop in Rinkeby. We can go over there in the morning.’

  Hultin had already worked out a plan, as usual. ‘Okay, since this is our best lead so far, I want all three of you on it. Holm, Chavez and Hjelm. But after you’ve heard what your Chilean friend has to say, Jorge, I want you back on the board-of-directors angle. That still could provide the best leads. But this murder may put an end to the business angle,’ he said to Söderstedt, who didn’t look the least disappointed. ‘We may send Pettersson and Florén back to the finance division. We’ll see. Arto, I want you to find out, of course, whether there are any business connections between these four men, but I think that this time we’re dealing with a different type of victim. We’re going to keep working in the same way. Nyberg will drag his notorious nets through the sea of snitches again and generally keep bottom-fishing. Norlander, if you’re ready to get back to work, I want you to stay on the mafia lead, as if nothing had happened.’

  Norlander nodded emphatically.

  ‘The more important question is obvious,’ Hultin added. ‘Why has he started up again? After waiting more than a month?’

  ‘What about the tape?’ Hjelm asked, instead of answering the question. ‘We can’t let the techs sit on it for weeks. And leak it to the press.’

  Hultin ejected the tape from the player. He held it in his hand for a moment, weighing the possibilities and risks. Then he tossed it to Kerstin Holm.

  ‘If we know our man correctly, then there won’t be any fingerprints. It looks like an ordinary Maxell tape, of a slightly older type. Probably untraceable. Am I right?’

  Hjelm, Chavez and Holm all looked at the tape.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ said Chavez.

  ‘Okay,’ said Hultin, with a little sigh. ‘Take good care of it.’

  21

  ‘MISTERIOSO’ WAS PLAYING on the door speakers, over and over again, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  ‘Did you guys get any sleep last night?’ asked Jorge Chavez.

  They were sitting in Hjelm’s unmarked Mazda. Hjelm was driving, and Holm was sitting next to him, playing the Thelonious Monk piece non-stop on the car stereo. Chavez was just as constantly popping up from the back seat.

  Hjelm and Holm replied only with slight movements of their heavy eyelids, which were trying to stay open, but also keep out the relentless glare of the summer-like sunshine. An impossible task.

  It was 18 May.

  ‘Monk would turn over in his grave if he knew that his marvellous music had inspired someone to commit a series of murders,’ Chavez went on, not sounding particularly sad. They were on the trail. At last.

  Again he received no answer from the front seat. That neither stopped him nor annoyed him.

  ‘I went over to headquarters last night, to look at the members of the boards of directors again. Intensive computer work. There are four ways to proceed from here. The most interesting is Sydbanken. All four men were actually on the board at the same time for a brief period in 1990. On the whole, that’s really the most promising lead. But maybe it’s even more interesting that Enar Brandberg was on the Lovisedal board at the same time as both Daggfeldt and Carlberger in 1991, the same media conglomerate that’s having problems with Viktor X’s protection racket today – GrimeBear, you sleepyheads. Assuming, of course, that Strand-Julén was a red herring. On the other hand, if our murderer has presented us with a red herring at this late date by killing Brandberg, then Ericsson and MEMAB will still have to be under consideration.’

  Still no answer.

  And once again it had no effect on Chavez’s enthusiasm. ‘I’m sure that Hultin is right, that one of these corporations is the key to the whole mystery.’

  The car stopped for a red light.

  ‘Turn at the OK petrol station,’ said Chavez. ‘On Rinkeby Allé. We can park where it dead-ends and walk across the square. I need to buy some fresh garlic.’

  Hjelm drove down the avenue and parked the car. ‘You seem a little hyper,’ he said.

  ‘The only way to stay awake,’ Chavez said.

  They crossed the lively square in the summery sunshine. The vendors’ stalls were bursting with vegetables and fruits of all sizes and types, seldom seen in ordinary grocery shops. Hjelm thought about the ban on pesticides in vegetables from abroad, compared to the Swedish ones. He felt grey and dreary in the midst of the bustling, colourful crowds.

  Chavez bought a bulb of fresh garlic and waved it in front of Hjelm’s face. ‘Begone, you blasphemer, Nosferatu.’

  Hjelm, who felt as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet, climbed out of his coffin with a foolish grin.

  They walked a few blocks to the heart of the Rinkeby district. Half a flight down, in one of the buildings that all looked the same, was a small shop with no visible signage, but extremely dusty windows. The shop turned out to be much larger than expected, and it was packed. People of all races were looking through the endless rows of CDs, containing music from every corner of the globe. A group of teenage boys of various colours, united by their baggy clothes and their baseball caps turned backwards, occupied the big hip-hop corner. And at the very back, behind the counter, sat a dark South American in his fifties, filing his nails.

  ‘Alberto!’ exclaimed Chavez, going over to hug the man, who stood up and proved to be gigantic.

  ‘Jorge, Jorge,’ said the man after they’d embraced for at least thirty seconds, then spoke rapidly in Spanish. Hjelm was able to catch the name ‘Skövde’, to which Jorge answered, ‘No, no, Sundsvall.’ Chavez pointed at his colleagues. Kerstin Holm had just dipped into a stack of Gregorian chants; she said a few words in her slightly faltering Spanish. Alberto laughed loudly. Hjelm smiled at him, noticing that the shop smelled of incense. A stick of it was smouldering in a pot of dried flowers on the counter.

  ‘Come with me,’ Alberto said to Hjelm and Holm, then continued in broken but essentially correct Swedish, ‘Let’s go into my inner sanctum.’

  They entered a small, dimly lit room. An exquisite stereo system occupied the absolute centre of the space.

  ‘Do you know that Jorge is one of this country’s finest Swedish-Chilean jazz bassists?’ said Alberto from the dark.

  ‘¡Esto con chorradas!’ cried Chavez merrily, stepping inside.

  ‘Yes, that’s true, that’s true,’ laughed Alberto loudly. ‘May I borrow the tape?’

  Holm was the last to enter the room, holding three CDs in her hand. She pulled the tape out of her bag.

  ‘Do you dare leave the shop unattended like this?’ she asked as she handed it over.

  ‘Nobody steals from me,’ said Alberto ominously, sticking the tape in the player. It started playing towards the end of ‘Misterioso’. ‘Really poor quality,’ he continued. ‘Copied two or even three times, I’d guess. Not from any CD. And there aren’t any typical LP clicks, either. The original is probably a classic Fifties reel-to-reel tape.’

  ‘Here it comes,’ said Chavez as the applause and cheering began. Then came the wild improvisations.

  Alberto’s face lit up in the dark. ‘Aaaahhhh,’ he said, then uttered an excited flood of Spanish.

  ‘Speak Swedish,’ said Chavez.

  ‘Sorry. Of course. This is very, very rare. Even I don’t have a copy. Wait a sec. Let me listen to the whole thing.’

  For three minutes, hardly more than that, the chaos continued. Towards the end the playing seemed less chaotic. It was as if the musicians had jointly found a form or shaped a form. It was highly remarkable; even Hjelm could hear the themes looping and passages meeting and combining and melding. Three very strange minutes had passed.

  Alberto cleared his throat and stopped the tape.

  ‘“Misterioso”, taped by the producer and Monk-fanatic Orrin Keepnews and the technician Ray Fowler on that magic night, 7 August 1958, at the Five Spot
Café in New York. On the CD, after Monk died, Keepnews added a couple of numbers that they’d rejected from the earlier Riverside taping on 9 July. They’re not included on this tape.

  ‘This must be the thing I’ve heard people talk about, but never actually heard before. It seems that this snippet ended up on the tape because Ray Fowler was drunk and fell asleep when he should have turned off the tape recorder. But that might be a myth. This improvisation was given a name afterwards: “Risky”. That’s what it’s called. Arriesgado, Jorge! Neither Keepnews nor Monk wanted to include it on the album, and it’s not on the collectors’ edition, either, The Complete Riverside Recordings. It was magical when it was born, but it died soon afterwards, or so they thought. As you can hear, that wasn’t the case. Somebody dragged this out of a deep cellar vault and copied it.’

  ‘You’ve heard people talk about it?’ said Hjelm. ‘When, where, how?’

  ‘I had an offer to purchase a copy sometime in the mid-Eighties. By an American jazz musician living in Sweden. But he wanted a thousand dollars. I didn’t go for it.’

  ‘Who was he?’ asked Chavez.

  ‘You know him, Jorge. You almost played with him a couple of years ago. Jim Barth Richards.’

  ‘The tenor man?’

  ‘Exactly. White Jim. The whitest skin I’ve ever seen on a jazz musician. A little like Johnny Winter. He stayed here in Sweden. Better treatment here, as he said when we met a year or two ago. He has to go into detox practically every other month. Then he can play again. I don’t know whether he’s playing anywhere right now or if he’s in rehab.’

  They thanked Alberto, got the tape back and were heading towards the door.

  Alberto said from the dark, ‘A copy in exchange for those CDs.’

  Kerstin Holm glanced down at the Gregorian CDs in her hand. She had forgotten all about them.

  ‘How long will it take?’ asked Chavez, just as Hjelm was about to object.

  Alberto laughed and punched a button to open the second cassette door. He took out a tape.

  ‘Already done,’ he said with a big smile.

  Jim Barth Richards did, in fact, have the whitest skin that Hjelm had ever seen. They were lucky enough to find him relatively sober, in a crappy one-room apartment in Gamla Stan that suited his persona. He was in his fifties, and his hair was as white as his complexion. He was sprawled out flat on a mattress on the floor, wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of the new jazz schools in the States,’ said Chavez. ‘The anti-self-destructive movement. The Marsalis brothers and some even more radical young guys. Don’t you think it’s about time to put this outsider myth on the shelf?’

  ‘Traditionalists!’ spat White Jim, in his American-accented Swedish. ‘They think they can create music by cramming down the whole fucking history of jazz. As if it were a school subject. Where does your fucking pain come from! Books? Fucking mama’s boys! Those who talk don’t know, those who know don’t talk.’

  Hjelm and Holm exchanged quick glances.

  ‘They create something new by knowing about everything,’ Chavez insisted. ‘That’s not so damned strange. They’re familiar with every riff, every little passage, every damn run in the history of jazz. That’s where they get all the power and all the pain they need. They can build on your conquests without having to repeat your mistakes. It’s a whole new way of relating to art.’

  ‘It’s an ancient way of relating to art!’ said Richards, barely keeping his fury in check. ‘One that we’ve finally managed to escape. And now they want to go back to the whole damned era of repetitions. I’m glad you never got to play with me, Jorge.’

  ‘You’re the ones who are repeating yourselves, precisely because you don’t know your own history. You think you’re creating something new just because you’re too drugged out to notice that you’ve done it all before. The personally unique expression is one long, damned repetition, the worst kind of self-delusion. The only way to really create something new is to become familiar with everything that has already been done. Then you can talk about a new beginning. The dawn of history again, but a dawn that contains within it all previous dawns.’

  ‘Theoretical bullshit,’ said White Jim, boiling over. ‘All the pain comes from in here!’ He slapped his bony chest, where every rib was visible through the dirty T-shirt. The slap produced a disquieting echo. ‘You can never replace direct feeling!’

  ‘That’s exactly the point!’ shouted Jorge, beginning to pace in the filthy apartment. ‘There’s no direct outlet from in here. That’s not where you get it from. The pain always has to take a path through various forms. It’s just that you don’t see it. You mistake the fog of drugs for emotion and try to invent the wheel over and over again, and each time you think you’ve done it. Authentic bullshit!’

  Hjelm was starting to get worried that they might lose White Jim before they even reached him. There seemed to be a high risk that they’d get thrown out at any moment. But instead, Richards sat up, uttered a loud bellow of laughter and patted the palm of his hand on the mattress.

  ‘Sit down, for God’s sake!’

  Jorge sat down, accepted the bottle of Jack Daniel’s that White Jim had conjured up from somewhere and took a big gulp.

  ‘You should have gone in for music,’ said White Jim. ‘Instead of all that.’ He pointed at Holm and Hjelm. ‘You take it seriously.’

  ‘Those two know more about music than you do,’ said Chavez. They both laughed for a long time. Hjelm understood very little. Kerstin Holm said calmly, ‘For example, we know about a tape of a little improvisation called “Risky”, played by Monk, Griffin, Malik and Haynes, which you tried to peddle ten years ago.’

  White Jim looked at her in astonishment. Then he roared with laughter. ‘Quite a long investigation, I must say. But all the priorities in the right places. Three cops come after an old sax has-been for a triviality. I’m deeply honoured, people!’

  ‘We’re not here to arrest you. We just want to know who your customers were.’

  ‘Not many people actually bought a copy, you know. When Red Mitchell brought me here in the mid-Seventies, I’d heard that you were a small country up by the Arctic Ocean and that you loved jazz. So I made as many copies as I could of that session, plus a number of other original tapes that Griffin had turned me on to in the early Sixties. I was playing a lot with Johnny back then, you know, young and green and enthusiastic. He told me there was a lot of unreleased material from the Five Spot period, like “’Round Midnight” and “Evidence” and “Risky” and plenty of other motherfucking tunes. Most of them have been released by now, when … what’s his name? The producer? Keepnews. When he needed cash.

  ‘But “Risky” and a few others are my babies. They haven’t been released. So yes, goddamn it, I brought ten different tapes like that from the States, and every once in a while I tried to sell them. This “Risky” tape was one of the last, sometime in ’85 or ’86. By then I knew who my customers were. There were only three; nobody else was willing to hand over big money for semi-lousy pirated recordings. It was fucking illegal, you know. I had no rights to them at all. I still have a couple of tapes left, by the way. For my retirement.’

  ‘Do you still have the addresses of the people who bought copies of the “Risky” tape?’ Holm asked doggedly.

  ‘Sure. Since the beginning of the Eighties, the buyers have always been the same people. Jazz lovers, maybe. Lovers of rare items, absolutely. If you’re not planning to arrest them, I’ll give you the addresses. Two in Stockholm and one in Växjö. Somewhere I’ve got a little fucking yellow notebook …’

  They searched through Richards’s disgusting mess of an apartment, casting aside the most astonishing objects: the dried head of a boa constrictor that turned to dust in Hjelm’s hands, filthy clothing, a shoebox containing Polish zloty bills, more dirty clothes, antiquated Finnish porn magazines with black patches hiding the genitals, still more dirty clothes, a number of throwing knives from B
otswana, another huge pile of dirty clothes, thirteen unwashed Guinness beer tankards that had been scattered around, an LP with no album cover but with Bill Evans’s autograph etched across the tracks, and thick stacks of pub receipts.

  ‘Why are you saving all these pub receipts?’ Chavez asked as he pulled the yellow notebook out of a pair of appallingly disintegrating underpants.

  ‘For tax reasons,’ said White Jim as he let the Jack Daniel’s burn its way down his throat.

  Just like in a B-movie, thought Hjelm.

  Chavez wrote down the names and addresses on the back of a pub receipt and handed the notebook back to White Jim, who tossed it into the room, belched and then fell asleep sitting up.

  Chavez and Holm laid him down on the floor, then pulled a blanket over the chalk-white body.

  ‘That guy,’ Chavez said as they came out into the sunshine, ‘is a truly great musician.’

  Holm nodded.

  Hjelm wasn’t sure what to believe.

  * * *

  Chavez returned reluctantly to police headquarters. Hjelm dropped Holm off at the nearest Stockholm address on White Jim’s list, then continued on to the address that was farther away.

  Holm went to see the retired major Erik Rådholm on Linnégatan. He was a distinguished-looking gentleman in late middle age, with a passion for unusual jazz recordings that was as monumental as it was unexpected. As Holm later described him, he looked more like a Sousa admirer, a man for whom rhythm meant marching in step. But that was not the case. He had an enormous collection of illegal pirated recordings from the most obscure little clubs, from Karelia in Finland to the interior of Ghana.

  At first he didn’t want to admit to anything that might be considered illegal. But by using methods that Holm refused to reveal, she got him to relent and, even with a certain pride, show her his impressive collection, hidden behind a bookcase that could be opened out into the room. He swore on ‘his country and his flag’ that he would never dream of copying a single one of his unique recordings. Holm both saw and listened to Major Rådholm’s copy of Jim Barth Richards’s ‘Risky’ tape. She stayed for two hours and also heard Lester Young in Salzburg and Kenny Clarke at the Hudiksvall Hotel.