The Sandman

by Lars Kepler

  “Maybe he’s not good at talking to women.”

  “When I tried to tell Mr. Takirov that DNA matching can take a bit of time, he said that they had the most modern system in the world. He just wanted to get rid of me.”

  “So they didn’t even give it a try.”

  “But we have a good relationship with the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation these days. Dmitry Urgov just called me back. Unfortunately, they don’t have anything that matches what I sent them. He said he’d personally ask the national police to look through the pictures and check their DNA register.”

  Corinne closes her eyes and massages her neck. Pollock tries to suppress the urge to offer to help.

  “My hands are warm,” Pollock ventures, just as Joona Linna comes in.

  “Can I feel them?” Joona asks in his deep voice.

  “Kazakhstan isn’t making things easy for us,” Corinne tells him. “But I—”

  “Jurek’s from Russia,” Joona says, taking a handful of candy from a bowl.

  “Russia,” she repeats.

  “He speaks perfect Russian.”

  “Would Dmitry Urgov have lied to me? Sorry, but I know him, and I really don’t believe that.”

  “He probably doesn’t know anything,” Joona says, putting the candy in his pocket. “Jurek’s old enough that it must have been in the days of the KGB.”

  128

  Pollock, Joona, and Corinne are leaning over the table, poring over their notes. Not long ago, they didn’t have anything. Now, thanks to Saga’s infiltration, they have a place to start. Jurek let something slip when he whispered “Leninsk.” He grew up in Kazakhstan, but because Susanne Hjälm had heard him speaking educated Russian, it seems highly likely that his family came from Russia.

  “But the security police there didn’t know anything,” Corinne reiterates.

  Joona takes out his phone and starts looking for a contact he hasn’t spoken to in many years. He can feel himself getting excited as he realizes he might finally be on the trail of the mystery of Jurek Walter.

  “What are you doing?” Corinne asks.

  “I’m going to talk to an old acquaintance.”

  “You’re calling Nikita Karpin!” Pollock exclaims. “Aren’t you?”

  Joona moves away, holding the phone to his ear. It rings with a hissing echo, and then there’s a crackle.

  “Didn’t I thank you for your help with Pichushkin?” Karpin asks abruptly.

  “Yes, you sent some little bars of soap—”

  “Isn’t that enough?” he interrupts. “You’re the most persistent young man I’ve ever met. I might have guessed that you’d call out of nowhere and disturb me.”

  “We’re working on a very complex case here, which—”

  “I never talk on the phone,” Nikita interrupts.

  “What if I organize an encrypted line?”

  “There’s nothing we couldn’t crack in twenty seconds,” the Russian says, laughing. “But that’s beside the point. I’m out of it now. I can’t help you.”

  “But you must have contacts?” Joona tries.

  “There’s no one left, and they don’t know anything about Leninsk. And if they did they wouldn’t say so.”

  “You already knew what I was going to ask,” Joona sighs.

  “Of course. Russia is a small country.”

  “Who should I talk to if I need an answer?”

  “Try the charming Federal Security Service in a month or so. I’m sorry”—Karpin yawns—“but I have to take Zean out for his walk. We usually go down the Klyazma, on the ice, as far as the bathing jetties.”

  “I see,” Joona says.

  He ends the call and smiles at the old man’s exaggerated caution. The former KGB agent doesn’t seem to trust that Russia has changed. Maybe he has a point.

  It wasn’t exactly a formal invitation, but, coming from Nikita Karpin, it was almost generous.

  Nikita’s old Samoyed dog, Zean, died when Joona was visiting eight years ago. Joona had been invited to give three lectures on the work that led to Jurek Walter’s capture. At the time, the Moscow police were in the middle of the hunt for the serial killer Alexander Pichushkin.

  Joona knows that the dog is dead. And Nikita knows that Joona knows where to find him if he goes for a walk on the ice on the Klyazma River.

  129

  It’s ten to seven in the evening, and Joona Linna is sitting on the last flight to Moscow. By the time the plane lands in Russia, it’s nearly midnight. The country is in the grip of a crisp chill, and the low temperatures make the snow quite dry.

  Joona is taking a taxi through the vast, monotonous suburbs. At first it feels as if he’s been trapped in a loop of sprawling public housing, but when he reaches the city center, the view from his window finally changes. He catches a glimpse of one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters—the beautiful skyscrapers—before the taxi turns onto a back street and stops outside the hotel.

  His room is very basic and dimly lit. The ceiling is high, and the walls are yellow with cigarette smoke. On the desk is a brown plastic electric samovar. The fire-escape notice on the back of the door has a cigarette burn over the emergency exit.

  As Joona stands at the only window, looking down at the alley, he can feel the winter chill through the glass. He lies back on the rough brown bedspread, gazes up at the ceiling, and listens to the muffled voices laughing and talking in the next room. He thinks it’s too late to call Disa and say good night.

  Thoughts are swirling through his mind, and their images carry him into sleep. A girl waiting for her mother to braid her hair. Saga Bauer looking at him, her head covered with cuts. Disa lying in his bathtub, humming, her eyes half closed.

  * * *

  —

  At half past five in the morning, Joona’s phone starts to vibrate on the bedside table. He slept in his clothes, with all the blankets and covers on top of him. The tip of his nose is freezing, and he has to blow on his fingers before he can switch the alarm off.

  Through the window, the sky is still dark.

  Joona goes down to the foyer and asks the young woman in Reception to rent a car for him. He sits at one of the ornately laid tables, drinks tea, and eats warm bread with melted butter and thick slices of cheese.

  An hour later, he is driving a brand-new BMW X3 on the M2 highway out of Moscow. Shiny black tarmac rushes under the car. There’s heavy traffic through Vidnoye, and it’s already eight o’clock by the time he turns off onto winding white roads.

  The trunks of the birch trees look like skinny young angels in the snow-covered landscape. Russia is so beautiful, it’s almost frightening.

  It’s cold and clear, and Lyubimova is bathed in wintry sunshine when Joona pulls into the yard in front of the house. He was once told the place used to be the Russian theater legend Stanislavsky’s summer residence.

  Nikita Karpin comes out onto the veranda.

  “You remembered my grubby old dog.” He smiles, shaking hands with Joona.

  Nikita Karpin is a short, stout man with an attractively aged face, a steely gaze, and a military haircut. When he was an agent, he was a frightening man.

  Though Nikita Karpin is no longer formally a member of the FSB, he’s still employed by the Ministry of Justice. Joona knows that if anyone can find out whether Jurek Walter has any connection to Russia, it’s Karpin.

  “We share an interest in serial killers,” Nikita says, showing Joona in. “For my part, they can be thought of as empty wells that can be filled with unsolved crimes—which of course is very practical. But, on the other hand, we have to arrest them so as not to appear incompetent, which makes the whole business much more complicated.”

  Joona follows Karpin into a large, beautiful room whose interior seems to have remained untouched for a hundred years. The old medallion wallpaper shimmers like thick cream. A framed portrait of Stanislavsky hangs above a black grand piano.

  The agent pours a drink from a frosted glass jug. On the table
is a gray cardboard box.

  “Elderflower cordial,” he says, patting his stomach.

  Joona takes the glass, and they sit down facing each other. Nikita’s face changes. His friendly smile vanishes.

  “The last time we met, most things were still secret. In those days, I was in charge of a specially trained group that went by the name of the Little Stick, in direct translation,” Nikita says in a low voice. “We were fairly heavy-handed, both my men and I.”

  He leans back in his chair, making it creak.

  “Maybe I’ll burn in hell for that?” he says pensively. “Unless there’s an angel who protects people who defend the motherland.”

  Nikita’s veined hands are lying on the table between the gray box and the jug of cordial.

  “I wanted to come down harder on the Chechen terrorists,” he continues gravely. “I’m proud of our actions in Beslan, and in my opinion Anna Politkovskaya was a traitor.”

  He puts his glass down and takes a deep breath.

  “I’ve looked at the material that your Security Police sent to the FSB. You haven’t managed to find much, Joona Linna.”

  “No,” Joona admits.

  “We used to call the young engineers and workmen who were sent to the cosmodrome in Leninsk ‘rocket fuel.’ ”

  “Rocket fuel?”

  “Everything surrounding the space program had to be kept secret. All reports were carefully encrypted. The intention was that the engineers would never come back from there. They were the best-educated scientists of their day, but they were treated like cattle.”

  The KGB agent pauses. Joona raises his glass and drinks.

  “My grandmother taught me how to make elderflower cordial.”

  “It’s very good.”

  “You did the right thing, coming to me, Joona Linna,” Karpin says. “I’ve borrowed a file from the Little Stick’s own archives.”

  130

  The old man pulls a gray file out of a cardboard box, opens it, and places a photograph on the table in front of Joona. It’s a group picture of twenty-two men standing in front of polished stone steps.

  “This was taken in Leninsk in 1955,” Karpin says.

  In the middle of the front row sits the legendary Sergei Korolev, smiling on one of the benches, the chief engineer behind the first man in space and the world’s first satellite.

  “Look at the men in back.”

  Joona leans forward and looks along the row of faces. Half hidden behind a man with tousled hair stands a skinny man with a thin face and pale eyes.

  Joona jerks his head back, stunned.

  He’s found Jurek Walter’s father.

  “I see him,” Joona says.

  “Stalin’s administration picked out the youngest and most talented engineers,” Nikita says, tossing an old Soviet passport in front of Joona. “And Vadim Levanov was without a doubt one of the best.”

  As he opens the passport, Joona feels his pulse quicken.

  The black-and-white photograph features a man who resembles Jurek Walter, but with warmer eyes and fewer wrinkles. So—Jurek’s father’s name was Vadim Levanov.

  His journey here has not been in vain. Now they can begin to investigate Jurek’s past properly.

  Nikita lays out a set of ten fingerprints, a few small personal photographs of Jurek’s father’s christening and childhood, school yearbooks, and a child’s drawing of a car with a chimney on its roof.

  “What do you want to know about him?” Karpin smiles. “We’ve got pretty much everything. Every address he ever lived at, names of girlfriends before his marriage to Elena Mishailova, letters home to his parents in Novosibirsk.”

  “His son,” Joona whispers.

  “His wife was also an engineer, but she died in childbirth after they’d been married two years.”

  “The son,” Joona repeats.

  Karpin stands up, opens the wooden cupboard, gets out a heavy case, and puts it on the table. When he lifts the lid, Joona sees that it’s a sixteen-millimeter film projector.

  Nikita Karpin asks Joona to close the curtains, then takes a reel of film from the box.

  “This is a private home movie from Leninsk that I think you should see.”

  The projector starts to click, and the image is projected directly onto the medallion wallpaper. Karpin adjusts the focus, then sits down again.

  The saturation of the image varies, but otherwise it’s fine. The camera must have been on a stand.

  The film was taken by Jurek Walter’s father during his time in Leninsk. The image on the wall in front of him shows the back of a house and a verdant garden. Sunlight filters through the leaves. In the background he can make out power lines.

  The image shakes a little; then Jurek’s father comes into view. He puts a heavy case down in the long grass, opens it, and gets out four camping chairs. A boy with neatly combed hair enters the frame from the left. He looks about seven years old and has chiseled features and big, pale eyes.

  There’s no doubt that it’s Jurek. Joona hardly dares to breathe.

  The boy says something, but all that can be heard is the clicking of the projector.

  Father and son help each other unfold the metal legs of the case, which transforms into a wooden-topped table when they turn it over.

  Young Jurek disappears from view but returns with a jug of water from the opposite side of the frame. It happens so quickly that Joona thinks there must have been some trick.

  Jurek bites his lips and clasps his hands tight as his father speaks to him.

  He disappears from view again, and his father strides after him.

  The water in the jug sparkles in the sunlight.

  A short while later, Jurek returns with a white paper bag, and then his father comes back with another child on his shoulders.

  The father is shaking his head and trotting like a horse.

  Joona can’t see the other child’s face.

  The child’s head is out of frame, but Jurek waves up at it.

  Feet with small shoes on kick at the father’s chest.

  Jurek calls out something.

  And when his father puts the second child down on the grass in front of the table, Joona sees that it, too, is Jurek.

  The identical boy stares into the camera with a serious face. A shadow sweeps across the garden. The father takes the paper bag and disappears out of the picture.

  “Identical twins.” The agent smiles, stopping the projector.

  “Twins,” Joona repeats.

  “That was why their mother died.”

  131

  Joona is staring at the medallion wallpaper, repeating silently to himself that the Sandman is Jurek Walter’s twin brother.

  That’s who’s holding Felicia captive.

  That was whom his daughter, Lumi, saw in the garden when she was going to wave at the cat.

  And that was why Susanne Hjälm saw Jurek in the parking lot outside the hospital.

  The warm projector is making small clicking sounds.

  Taking his glass with him, Joona walks to the window and opens the curtains. He looks out at the ice-covered surface of the Klyazma River.

  “How were you able to find all this?” he asks when he’s confident his voice won’t crack. “How many files did you have to go through? I mean, you must have material covering millions of people.”

  “Yes, but we only had one defector from Leninsk to Sweden,” Karpin replies.

  “Their father fled to Sweden?”

  “The summer of 1957 was a difficult time in Leninsk,” Nikita says cryptically, lighting a cigarette.

  “What happened?”

  “We made two attempts to launch Semyorka. The first time, the auxiliary rocket caught fire and the missile crashed four hundred kilometers away. The second time—the same fiasco. I was sent down there to remove the people responsible. Give them a taste of the Little Stick. Don’t forget that no less than five percent of the entire GDP of the Soviet Union went to the installation at Leninsk.
The third launch attempt succeeded, and the engineers could breathe again, until the Nedelin disaster three years later.”

  “I’ve read about that,” Joona says.

  “Mitrofan Nedelin rushed the development of an intercontinental rocket,” Nikita says, looking at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “It exploded in the middle of the cosmodrome, and more than a hundred people burned to death. Vadim Levanov and the twins were unaccounted for. For months, we thought they’d been killed along with everyone else.”

  “But they hadn’t,” Joona says.

  “No,” Nikita says. “He fled because he was afraid of reprisals, and he would certainly have ended up in the Gulag. Probably the Siblag work camp. Instead, he turned up in Sweden.”

  Nikita stubs his cigarette out on a small porcelain saucer.

  “We kept Vadim Levanov and the twins under constant surveillance and were prepared to liquidate him,” Karpin continues. “But we didn’t need to. Because Sweden treated him like garbage and arranged a special Gulag for him. The only work he could get was as a manual laborer in a gravel quarry.”

  Nikita’s eyes flash cruelly.

  “If you’d shown any interest in what he knew, Sweden could have been first into space.” He laughs.

  “Maybe,” Joona says.

  “Yes.”

  “So Jurek and his brother arrived in Sweden at the age of ten or so?”

  “But they only stayed a couple of years,” Nikita says.

  “Why?”

  “You don’t become a serial killer for no reason.”

  “Do you know what happened?” Joona asks.

  “Yes.”

  Nikita turns toward the window and wets his lips. The low winter light shines in through the uneven glass.

  132

  Today Saga is first into the dayroom. She runs for four minutes and has just lowered the speed and started to walk when Bernie comes in from his room.

  “I’m going to start driving a taxi when I’m free. Shit, like some fucking Fittipaldi. You can ride for free, and I’ll get to touch you between—”