The Torso dih-2

by Helene Tursten

  “When was that?”

  “June 1997. Almost two years ago.”

  It was a good thing he added that it had been almost two years ago; the number ninety-seven, uttered in Danish, was completely incomprehensible to Irene’s ears.

  “I think we can drive out there later if it’s necessary. It feels more important to see the sign with the dragon.”

  “You’ll get to see that in just a second.”

  They drove down a wide street that, according to the signs, was Bernstorffsgade. Peter Møller turned into a parking lot behind a boxlike building of gloomy brown brick. He didn’t have to tell Irene that they had parked behind the Police Department. All police department buildings built during the sixties and seventies appeared to have been designed by the same deeply depressed architect.

  “Come. We’ll go and look at the sign right away,” said Peter.

  They left the parking lot and started walking along a small, quiet street lined with dreary-looking houses. The dirty building fronts, rotten doors, and windowsills with chipped paint gave the whole street an atmosphere of gloomy decay. The dirty gray weather added to the unpleasant impression.

  The houses farther down the street were covered with scaffolding and plastic fabric. Under the fabric, the harsh buzzing of a highpressure sprayer could be heard.

  “Nice that they are renovating the old buildings,” said Irene.

  “They are trying to sanitize the shacks. Get the houses in order and raise the rents so that the rabble can’t afford to stay there. These old houses are in an attractive central location.”

  “Something similar has been done at home in Göteborg. Has it been successful here?”

  “The poor are driven away, farther out into the suburbs. They are the drug addicts and the street prostitutes. We don’t get rid of the others as easily. They have far too much money.”

  “Sex is a profitable business,” Irene concluded.

  “Exactly. Do you know anything about Vesterbro?”

  “No.”

  “It’s known as Sin Central in Copenhagen. It used to be Nyhavn but now only millionaires and people of culture can afford to live there. Upscale bars and restaurants have opened, pushing out all but the most discreet sex operations. But if you want sex, you come to Vesterbro and, above all, to the area around Istedgade. Everything can be found here. Absolutely everything!” As confirmation, a porn movie store popped up advertising “Here you can get the video you didn’t think existed!” Peter continued walking as though he hadn’t noticed.

  “Are we on the way to Istedgade?” Irene asked.

  “Yes, to one of the cross streets. We’re almost there.”

  A sex shop on the corner in front of them had thin gauze underwear with strategically placed holes hanging in the display window. As a counterbalance, there were more substantial items in leather but these also seemed to be made of thin straps and holes. It was probably a good thing they were well equipped with rivets so that they sort of held together. In order to embellish the display further, whips and handcuffs hung from the ceiling. Dildos in various colors and sizes lay on the floor of the display window. A large one in black rubber was almost as long and as thick as Irene’s forearm.

  Bewildering pictures came to mind: A man was whipping a woman in see-through red underwear after first having chained her with handcuffs to the bedpost and then taken the black rubber dildo. . What kind of people would have to subordinate other people in order to get some enjoyment? Was it power over another person that gave them a boost? Pictures, and mechanical procedures with sex toys, provide a quick release. Warm and sensual relationships are more difficult and take longer to build. Most of all, they required emotional engagement. Masturbation is easy; relationships, difficult and time consuming.

  Suddenly she became aware that Peter Møller was talking to her. With a great deal of effort she abandoned her train of thought.

  “Pardon me. What did you say?”

  “Are you going to buy anything?” Peter teased.

  Irene felt her throat tighten with rage but she managed to sound relatively calm when she answered, “No. There’s nothing here that I want. I get depressed when I see this sort of thing.”

  “It’s just for fun. Casual sex toys-”

  “No! It cannot be fun to have that huge rubber dick shoved in! It must hurt terribly!”

  She stopped herself and tried to calm down. Møller looked at her in confusion. With great control she said, “You may not understand this, but there is no casual sex in this display window.”

  Peter Møller didn’t answer. He looked completely unsympathetic and shook his head slightly. Maybe he thought his colleague from Sweden had taken a dose of prudishness? He could think what he wanted.

  They crossed Istedgade and walked one block up the street of sin.

  “Here it is,” said Peter Møller. He stopped at the corner and pointed at a cross street. The street sign said Colbjørnsensgade. Irene took a few steps before she stopped short.

  A large enameled sign hung on the wall over a store. It was almost three square meters in size. The Japanese character for “man” was encircled by a terrifying dragon. The background was light blue, which effectively contrasted with the colorful dragon. Every scale on the monster’s body glittered in varying colors. The horrifying mouth with its razor-sharp teeth was wide open, and the whole monster pulsated with restrained power.

  But the sign was not hanging over a store for Asian food. On the display window it said, “The Best Gay Place In Town.”

  “A gay sex store,” Irene said. She couldn’t help letting out a deep sigh. Møller glanced at her but didn’t say anything. They walked up to the shop’s window.

  Things were also hanging from the ceiling in this display window. They looked to Irene like Barbie’s fiancé, Ken, but when Peter and Irene came closer, Irene realized her mistake. These boy dolls were not intended for little girls; they were supposed to be used by boys and grown men. The dolls were dressed in different outfits but their pants were pulled down to their knees, in order to show that they were well endowed. A human-size display doll stood on one side of the window. The uniform he was wearing looked surprisingly like a real police uniform and he was holding a bunch of handcuffs in both his hands. Across from the police doll hung a porcelain urinal. Along the edge there was a whitish liquid that was apparently supposed to represent semen. Dildos, videos, and magazines lay on the floor. One of the covers caught Irene’s eye. The magazine was called Fist, which would have been Knytnäve in Swedish. The picture showed two male hands spreading apart the buttocks of another man.

  “This is sick,” Irene said loudly.

  Møller shrugged but didn’t comment. Irene turned toward him and caught his gaze.

  “Have you or anyone else from the police been here and spoken with the owner about the sign and the connection to our murder-mutilation case?”

  “No.”

  “Then we have to go in and find out if he knows anything.”

  Møller sighed. “We probably should. Then you’ll get to meet Tom Tanaka.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The owner.”

  Again he went first and held the door for Irene. His courtesy pleased her. He was polite and well mannered but unaccustomed to being so, in Irene’s opinion. She stepped into the gay shop with an uneasy feeling in her stomach.

  Everything she had anticipated was on display. Leather clothes, leather corsets, leather scrotums, whips, and rubber clothes were hanging everywhere. There were neat shelves lined with videos and magazines and sex toys of whose purpose she had no idea. Two men were standing close together over a leather corset, talking, but they stopped when Irene made her entrance. They weren’t relieved when Peter Møller appeared right behind her. Suspiciously, they observed the police officers’ progress to the store counter. Tom Tanaka was enthroned behind it.

  Whatever Irene had expected, this man surprised her. He was almost two meters tall and probably weighed over
two hundred kilos. He looked like a sumo wrestler, and wore his hair in the characteristic style with small hard knots of hair at his crown. To Irene’s relief, he was not wearing the diaperlike pants in which sumo wrestlers compete; instead his huge body was covered in black silk pajamas.

  Irene’s undisguised surprise must have been obvious because Tom Tanaka made a hint of a bow and said in English with a strong American accent, “If you’re surprised to see me here, it’s nothing compared to how I feel about seeing you.”

  His voice was very deep and his tone ironic. Irene couldn’t keep from smiling.

  “Good day. My name is Irene Huss. I’m a police officer from Göteborg, Sweden, and I’m investigating. . a crime. May I ask a few questions?” she said in her broken English.

  Tom Tanaka looked at her without expression through dark eyes embedded in the huge rolls of fat on his face. Irene didn’t believe that the man in front of her was an out-of-shape, harmless mountain of lard. Fighting with a sumo wrestler was like running right into an oncoming steam locomotive traveling at full speed.

  The Japanese man nodded slightly. In a deep bass he rumbled, “Emil.”

  The door behind Tanaka opened almost instantaneously, and a tall, ruddy young man stuck out his head and also answered in English, but with a heavy Danish accent, “I’m almost done eating-”

  He stopped himself when he became aware of Irene and Peter. His gaze locked onto Peter but quickly shifted. Irene suspected there had been a hint of recognition. Emil swallowed hard several times, and his prominent Adam’s apple yo-yoed up and down his thin throat.

  “Will you take over the store while I’m speaking with the police officers?”

  Emil hurried to finish chewing. He slipped through the door and stood behind the counter as far away from the arm of the law as he could get, nervously pulling at his red goatee.

  With a massive hand Tom Tanaka gestured toward the door. They passed through a small windowless employee lounge with soft lighting and two comfortable black leather recliners. Tom Tanaka went over to a heavy door and unlocked it.

  Inside there was a huge, very modern kitchen done in white, black, and stainless steel. The floor was laid with wide polished boards of cherrywood. A strong smell of fried fish hung in the air. On the other side of the kitchen Irene glimpsed a sizeable room like a living room. She heard the sound and saw the color flickering from a TV. Between the kitchen and the living room there was a small hallway.

  “I live here,” Tanaka said simply.

  “So you don’t have far to go to work,” Irene tried to joke.

  “True,” the Japanese man replied.

  He led the way through the kitchen and then headed to the right. The floor beams creaked under his considerable weight. He opened a door and preceded them into the room. There was no other option since neither Irene nor Peter would have been able to squeeze past him.

  “My office,” said Tanaka.

  This room was also large. A pleasant smell of expensive cigar smoke encircled the visitors. The room was sparsely furnished in Japanese style. The desk was made of black shiny wood, and the black leather desk chair had obviously been specially constructed to hold Tom Tanaka’s colossal body.

  Along the short side of the room there was a glass cabinet containing knickknacks and prize buckles. Irene observed, “You must be a good sumo wrestler.”

  One of the corners of Tom’s mouth twitched and Irene took it to be an amused smile.

  “Was a good sumo wrestler. I’m retired.”

  Irene looked at him, surprised. He couldn’t be older than she was.

  “We retire at age forty.”

  She didn’t know why she volunteered, “I’ve also worked with Japanese wrestling-jujitsu.”

  Tanaka didn’t respond. He pointed at two cloth-covered chairs next to the desk.

  “Please,” he said.

  Irene and Peter Møller sat. Then Irene realized that Møller hadn’t said a word since they’d entered the store. She looked at him but he remained silent so she started talking about the dismembered male corpse they had found in Sweden. She emphasized that the only clue they had to the man’s identity was a dragon tattoo, and raised her gaze over Tanaka’s head to look at a silk painting that was evidently the original of both the sign and the tattoo.

  There was one important difference: there was no sign for man on the painting. Instead, a pointy mountaintop could be seen. Irene recognized the holy mountain, Mount Fuji. She said so and Tanaka nodded.

  “Colleagues here in Copenhagen contacted us when we sent out the picture of the tattoo via Interpol. That’s why I’m here. Do you know who the man might be?”

  “No. No idea.”

  “You don’t know of anyone who has had a tattoo done based on your sign or this painting?”

  He shook his head in denial.

  “I’ve had the store for less than two years. I inherited it from my cousin. He was the one who started it, years ago. Maybe the tattoo was made during his time. The idea for the sign and for replacing Fuji were also his,” he said.

  Irene thought a moment, then asked, “Do you know of any tattoo artist in the area who is especially skilled?”

  “A master? No.”

  They rose at the same time, and Tanaka led the way. At the kitchen door he stopped with his hand on the door handle and turned to Irene.

  “Keikoku. Uke. Okata?” he asked softly.

  He warned her of enemies and asked if she had understood. She didn’t know the Japanese language but these words and expressions were used in martial arts. In a calm voice she answered, “Hai.”

  Tanaka let them out through the shop, which now contained many more customers. With a neutral “good-bye,” he closed the door after them.

  “What was it he said in Japanese?” Møller asked when the door shut behind them.

  Irene concluded that he hadn’t understood Tanaka’s warning. She didn’t know anything about him, and he, too, might have been familiar with Japanese martial arts. But she was willing to take the risk.

  “He asked if I remembered any terms from jujitsu,” she said indifferently.

  They walked back to the Police Department in silence.

  “ THIS IS Inspector Jens Metz.”

  Peter Møller introduced Irene to the heavyset, reddish blond colleague in an office that smelled like stale smoke. Jens Metz looked so typically Danish that Irene had to hold back a giggle. Instead, she gave him a friendly smile and let her hand be encircled by his sausage-like fingers. He wasn’t in Tanaka’s class, but he was heading in that direction. Irene guessed his age to be somewhere around fifty-five.

  “Welcome to Copenhagen. But the reason could have been more pleasant.” Metz smiled with nicotine-stained teeth.

  He appeared to be friendly and efficient. Out of nowhere he magically made three steaming cups of coffee appear on the desk. This sort of thing always earned bonus points in Irene’s coffee-dependent existence. That the coffee tasted like it had been brewed from crushed pieces of vinyl was a completely different matter. One can get used to Danish coffee, Irene tried to tell herself.

  Jens Metz tapped a pile of thick folders that was lying on the table.

  “Here is the material from the case of the murder-mutilation of Carmen Østergaard. You’ll get to meet the medical examiner tomorrow at eleven o’clock. One of us will drive you there,” he said. And he briefly went through the investigation of the dismembered corpse that had floated onto the beach in Hellerup. The first sacks had been found on June 3, 1997. Two more sacks were found the day after. The head, limbs, and the intestines were never found. Both breasts, including the musculature, along with the buttocks, were gone. The outer genitalia and the rectal opening had been removed. The victim had extensive bruising on her pubic bone as a result of extremely brutal force.

  “She was as empty as a watch case,” Metz commented.

  “The dismemberment sounds strikingly like that of our corpse,” Irene observed.

  “You�
�ll get more details about it from the pathologist tomorrow. We didn’t know who the victim was, but two days later, on June 5, a man named Kurt Østergaard reported that his wife, Carmen, was missing. He hadn’t seen her since the last week in May. He started missing her then since she was his source of income. Both of them were on heroin. We could rule out Kurt as the murderer pretty quickly. He wouldn’t have been able to hold a knife in the shape he was in. Actually, I heard that he died last winter of an overdose.”

  Metz caught his breath, wet his index finger, and turned the page. “At the time of her death, Carmen was twenty-five years old. She had been a prostitute for four years, the same period during which she had been married to Kurt and hooked on heroin. Her mother was Danish and her father Spanish. The girl was a souvenir from a hitchhiking trip to Spain. Many of us in the district knew Carmen, since she lived here in Vesterbro. The mortician established that she was HIV positive. She probably wasn’t aware of it since she wasn’t registered anywhere for testing. We interrogated Kurt but he couldn’t give us any information. Carmen never told him about her customers; she just gave him money.”

  Metz looked down at the papers and continued, “We interrogated all the prostitutes in Vesterbro. A lot of the women had been threatened by customers during that time, with everything from strangulation to assault. But nothing sounded like the murderer we were after. Sometimes Carmen hung out with two other prostitutes. They talked with each other in between clients and ate together. Carmen supposedly talked to one of them in a café about a police officer who had frightened her in the days before she was killed. A customer who paid well but had strange requests and was also a cop. Carmen never said what in particular the police officer wanted. Before they left the café, Carmen allegedly said, ‘The policeman or the doctor will be the death of me.’ Her friend asked her if she had to see them again and she just said, ‘Yes. Money and drugs.’”

  “Did any of the other prostitutes know anything about a suspicious policeman or doctor?”

  “One broad talked about a strange doctor and another started talking about a policeman. But she was high on God knows what. When she started to come down, she denied everything and claimed that she had made it all up. We never found any evidence that these two characters existed.”