Europa Blues

by Arne Dahl

  Marconi had nodded. Then he had said: ‘There’s a way in.’

  Arto Söderstedt had watched him as he leaned forward over the drawing of the palazzo they had unrolled on the desk. Only then did Söderstedt start to see just how intricately mapped each of the rooms in the palace were.

  ‘We really do know every single nook and cranny of Palazzo Riguardo,’ Marconi had continued. ‘It’s from here that the activities which destroy our country and our continent are organised. Marco di Spinelli’s business is, quite simply, market economics in its purest form. An unregulated market economy holed up in a palace where the greatest artists in the West have, over the years, adorned the corridors of power. It’s great, consummate beauty; it’s education; it’s a sense of history – and it’s pure, brutal power.’

  Arto Söderstedt was starting to understand why the palace was so well documented. Marconi and his men understood the entire mechanics of the operation – they just couldn’t stop it.

  ‘The palace was built a bit like an onion,’ Marconi had made a sweeping gesture over the sketch. ‘With the difference that the palace has a heart. The heart is Marco di Spinelli’s office. You have to go through layer after layer to get to it. When the Perduto family built the palace during the sixteenth century, they were facing threats from all directions. The palace was constructed like a series of surrounding walls. It’s not something you notice as you tread its corridors, but the fact is you’re crossing drawbridge after drawbridge, and they can be raised so quickly that you’d fall right down into the moat, if you’ll forgive the metaphor. Despite the fact that the palace seems so open and roomy, there is just one way out of each of the layers, and by each of those doors is a closely watched and quickly raised drawbridge. Trying to make your way through the layers by these doors is pointless. But there’s an alternative route. We call it “the strait gate”.’

  Söderstedt had given a short laugh. ‘“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’”

  Marconi had given him a quick glance. A fleeting smile had passed over his face, and he had nodded. ‘Matthew, 7:13. It really is narrow, and few have ever found it. It’s the ace up our sleeve. If ever we need to get in there quickly.’

  Now, on the veranda, Söderstedt watched Marconi’s digital line snake its way through the palace on the map on his computer screen. It stretched out into the dark Tuscan landscape like the light trails left behind by fireflies. He imagined it was forming some kind of illegible text.

  Once Marconi had finished drawing his line, Söderstedt had asked: ‘What do you think Marco di Spinelli did during the war?’

  Marconi had put down his pen and stared at his Nordic colleague.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ he had replied. ‘He was a Nazi.’

  As though conjured up by the simile, a cloud of fireflies swarmed into the garden, performing a dance that remained visible long, long after they had disappeared. A magpie’s nest of light which he couldn’t blink away, making it impossible to distinguish Marconi’s narrow gate.

  Arto Söderstedt sat there for a good while, staring out into the nothingness and trying to read the fireflies’ writing. He studied it for so long that the text slowly faded before his eyes. Until eventually, only Italo Marconi’s pale line was left. It snaked right across the drawing, like a child’s shaky pencil line through a comic-book labyrinth.

  He could imagine how the Erinyes, perhaps even at that very moment, were sat hunched over the exact same drawing, pointing at the exact same line. They were coming, he could feel it. Suddenly, it felt as though the garden began to quiver. From the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow slip behind a tree. Then another. Until all of nature seemed to be awash with shifting shadows, the trees themselves in movement, the forest approaching.

  Arto Söderstedt shuddered and tried to shake off his unease.

  Who were they, these unrelenting figures from the forgotten depths of mythology?

  Civilisation thought it had tamed them a few thousand years earlier.

  They crept up on their victims. With great precision, they drove their increasingly petrified prey towards the designated murder scene. When they got there, their victims would be meek, shaken to the very core of their beings. They caused the forgotten, repressed depths to tremble, and then they hung their victims upside down and drove a terrible nail into their brains.

  By that point, they had already scared their victims senseless.

  All other than Leonard Sheinkman. He had spoken to them. Calmly and quietly.

  It was as though he had been waiting for them.

  As though he had been waiting for them for a very long time.

  As though he had known that, sooner or later, they would be coming.

  What had he been waiting for? Was it something he had seen in the concentration camp? Was it his own betrayal, which Paul Hjelm had described after having read his diary? His double betrayal?

  Was he waiting for the spirits of his wife and son to seek their vengeance?

  No, his betrayal wasn’t of that kind. He could have taken his family and moved to America, of course – not having done so was, in itself, a betrayal of sorts. And of course, he could have protested loudly when his wife and son were slaughtered, but that wouldn’t have made any real difference.

  No, this was something else, something worse. On that point, Söderstedt was in complete agreement with Paul. ‘I’ve got a vague feeling there’s something wrong somewhere,’ as he had said on the phone.

  And then the second conversation had come.

  From Hultin.

  ‘What do you say about the spookily beautiful Odessa?’

  He would be leaving tomorrow. He would be leaving his neglected paradise and entering the wolf’s lair, having to avoid being robbed and shot by aggressive beggars, and having to coax reluctant Eastern European policemen and women without computers into working with him.

  It was the choice he had made.

  And he didn’t regret it for a second.

  He glanced at his watch. It was time. He closed the document containing the drawing of Palazzo Riguardo and changed the CD for another, a newly bought one. He started the installation Wizard and opened a box on the table next to the computer. In the background, the cicadas were singing.

  He took out a device that looked like a little flashlight, plugged it into his laptop and attached it to the top of his computer screen.

  The installation was complete. He accepted all of its mysterious licence agreements and caught sight of himself on-screen. His face was dark.

  He moved the floor lamp from behind him and pointed its beam of light at his face. As he did so, the face on the screen also lit up. For a moment, he thought it was Uncle Pertti he could see, the young Pertti, his hand gripping his sabre. So ludicrously similar to Arto Söderstedt. What was he doing there? A shudder ran through him.

  Arto stuck out his tongue. On the computer screen, Uncle Pertti did the same.

  The spell was broken.

  He returned to his technology. It should all work now.

  He got rid of his picture on-screen. It was his and his alone.

  As he set up the Internet connection, the insects began to gather around the lone source of light. He could feel that his face was covered with unknown winged insects when a completely different but equally well-known face finally appeared on-screen, and he said:

  ‘Hello, wage labourers.’

  31

  CILLA LOOKED EXPECTANT as the hardened couple made their way in through an elegant doorway in Birkastan. The expression remained as they climbed the stairs – genuine art nouveau – and when it was still there as they reached a door marked with the neighbourhood’s only foreign name, even Paul Hjelm allowed himself to feel expectant.

  Though it was almost half past seven.

  She took
hold of his arm in a way he remembered from their youth. It had been so long since she had done it that he almost felt moved.

  ‘Just think, finally getting to meet everyone,’ she said as he ceremoniously folded back the paper on the bunch of flowers he had just bought from the 7-Eleven on the corner.

  ‘You’ve met them before, haven’t you?’ he said, surprised.

  ‘No,’ she said, squeezing his arm.

  He rang the bell.

  Sara answered. She was wearing barely any make-up below her greenish crop, which seemed more straggly than usual in honour of the party; the simple, dark blue dress she was wearing made no attempt to hide her figure. She hugged them both and welcomed them in. The half-wilted bouquet from 7-Eleven was thankfully accompanied by a bottle of malt whisky.

  She glanced at it, nodded, and whispered to Paul: ‘You haven’t forgotten the golden rule, have you?’

  Paul chuckled and shook his head.

  To say not a single word about the ongoing case.

  He would do everything in his power to keep that promise. But it wouldn’t be easy.

  Jorge came to greet them from somewhere in the bowels of the flat. He was wearing a blue shirt and a brand-new beige linen suit. It looked exactly like his old one.

  ‘The food’s ruined now,’ he said, forcing two glasses of Martini Rosso into their hands.

  ‘Oh,’ said Cilla as she hung up her coat. ‘Are we late?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jorge. ‘You’re glowing, Cilla.’

  ‘Glowing?’ she said, hugging him.

  He glanced at the bottle of whisky Sara handed him.

  ‘Cragganmore?’ he said.

  ‘Perfect for when you’re tired of the excesses,’ said Paul.

  ‘Well, come in and have a look round, then,’ Jorge said with a confident, welcoming gesture to the late-arriving couple. ‘To think that not even you’ve been here, Paul. That’s what I call social misery.’

  They moved on from the narrow hallway through a curtain of knotted Indian beads.

  ‘Chilean,’ said Jorge.

  The scent of garlic-saturated food beckoned them into the living room. On the way, Paul glanced into the kitchen. It was big and old and looked cosy. Though a wooden floor in a kitchen seemed a bit unusual. On the gas hob, a couple of stews were bubbling away.

  ‘Gas,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘Unrivalled,’ said Jorge. ‘But don’t peep yet.’

  The women had already reached the living room. They were leaning over a group of people sitting around a small Indian-looking glass table. Each of them seemed to be holding a glass of reddish liquid.

  Apart from one, who was holding a baby bottle. She was sitting on Viggo Norlander’s lap.

  Paul gave them a general wave and cast a quick glance around the room. It was quite big, with a relatively large amount of mixed furniture. There wasn’t much space – probably because of the abnormally big circular table in the middle of the room taking it all up. A surprising number of books, and a couple of genuine-looking paintings on the walls. The overall impression was one of good, albeit chaotic, taste.

  Something which probably matched Jorge and Sara fairly well.

  Slightly distracted, he ruffled little Charlotte’s thin, dark blonde hair. Then he held his hand out to the woman by Viggo’s side. She had the same colour hair as her daughter and was wearing a sober floral dress; she looked as though she was rapidly approaching the fifty-year mark.

  ‘Paul,’ he said.

  ‘Astrid,’ she replied. ‘So you’re the famous Paul Hjelm. The master detective.’

  Paul cast a surprised glance at Viggo, who shrugged ambiguously and threw a giggling Charlotte up in the air.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Paul said.

  ‘What for?’ asked Astrid.

  Paul cast yet another glance at Viggo, more uneasily this time, but Viggo simply continued throwing his daughter up in the air.

  ‘For the new addition to the family.’

  ‘Ah,’ Astrid replied, surprised but not angry. ‘Right, yes. Thanks.’

  He turned to Viggo, pointed at little Charlotte, and said: ‘You must’ve been videotaping her too?’

  ‘She’s the one I’ve been practising on,’ Viggo replied, deadly serious.

  Paul moved further along the sofa. He could see Cilla talking to Kerstin Holm out of the corner of his eye; it felt slightly odd.

  A small, dark woman dressed in black held out her hand to him and exclaimed: ‘Ludmila.’

  He couldn’t quite make the connection. He felt sluggish and ungainly. A fish on dry land.

  ‘Paul,’ he said, his gills flapping. ‘Hi.’

  A bookcase swung to one side and an enormous body squeezed out from behind it.

  ‘Christ, that loo’s small,’ Gunnar Nyberg said, coming over to them. He headed straight for Cilla and greeted her politely, like a retired officer from the old guard.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jorge said loudly. ‘That’s the problem with this place. There’s no room for a washing machine.’

  Only when Paul caught sight of Gunnar did he make the connection. Still holding the small, dark woman’s hand, he blurted out: ‘Right! Ludmila. The professor.’

  ‘Titles are important, Detective Inspector,’ Ludmila said with gentle irony. He smiled to himself. It went quite well.

  Gunnar Nyberg laughed a loud, rumbling laugh. Paul Hjelm wondered what Cilla had said to evoke such a bellow. He managed to elicit very few of them himself.

  He had reached the inner corner of the sofa. An elderly lady with greying hair and pronounced lines around her eyes held out her hand with a neutral expression. That was enough for him to make the connection. It was getting better and better. He was starting to find his feet again.

  ‘Mrs Hultin, I presume,’ he said archaically.

  ‘Stina,’ the lady said neutrally.

  ‘Paul,’ he said, unnecessarily adding: ‘Hjelm.’

  It was that whole thing with first and last names. He still found it ridiculously difficult calling Hultin anything other than Hultin and so his wife was automatically none other than ‘Mrs Hultin’. Anything else would require far too much willpower. Deep down, he wished he knew why. It was probably some kind of hierarchical imprint he had never quite managed to escape.

  The hour of the trial had arrived. Hultin was squashed into the corner, his glass so dry it seemed almost to have been licked clean. They greeted one another.

  ‘Jan-Olov,’ Paul said with a display of sheer willpower. ‘Your glass is empty, I see.’

  ‘We got here forty-five minutes ago,’ said Hultin. ‘I’ve never trusted that saying “Better late than never”.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Paul. ‘And I’m still always last.’

  Just then, Sara appeared in the kitchen doorway, clapping her hands together like an old-fashioned hostess.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said in a firm, resolute voice, ‘come to the table. Jorge – help carrying.’

  ‘Help and help,’ said Jorge, reluctantly peeling away from the others. ‘I cooked the food.’

  ‘And I’m the prime minister,’ Sara said, disappearing back into the kitchen.

  The guests got hesitantly to their feet; there are very few people who want to be first to an empty table. Especially if there are no designated places set out, which turned out to be the case.

  On their way over, Paul bumped into Cilla and Kerstin. He gave Kerstin a hug. Cilla stood alongside, watching them. It still felt slightly odd. Despite the fact that years had passed, spreading a comforting blanket of reconciliation over everything that had happened. If we want to wallow in clichés.

  ‘Everything OK, Kerstin?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup,’ she replied.

  With that, nothing more was said. Gunnar climbed up onto a chair. It strained as best it could to prove it could withstand all possible laws of physics. And it succeeded: it held his weight.

  The great man on the chair counted out loud.

  ‘One, two, thre
e, four, five, six women. Seven including Charlotte. One, two, three, four, five men. Clearly uneven.’

  ‘We can sit next to one another,’ Kerstin and Cilla said.

  Paul looked at them with suspicion.

  ‘Let’s do it like this,’ said Gunnar who, in his new-found euphoric condition seemed also to have been struck by a fondness for leadership. ‘Astrid next to me, then Jan-Olov, Sara, Paul, Stina, Viggo, Ludmila, Jorge, Cilla, Kerstin. And Charlotte can sit with …?’

  ‘Astrid,’ said Viggo, just as Astrid said: ‘Viggo.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Gunnar, hopping down from the chair with the freedom of movement of a newly-svelte man. And with that, it was settled.

  Sure enough, Charlotte ended up sitting on Viggo’s lap. They were served a Chilean meat stew containing a surprising amount of garlic. The wine, Duca d’Aragona 1993, was perfectly suited to it, and was subsequently consumed in near-bacchanal quantities.

  ‘Wine consumption is a sign of Europeanisation,’ Ludmila said towards the end of the meal. She said it in a tone that didn’t leave any room for objection.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Hultin asked, surprising the group by being responsible for the majority of it. The wine consumption, that was.

  ‘When I first came to Sweden,’ Ludmila said, ‘you were as much a part of the vodka-drinking nations as us Russians – just not quite to the same extent. But you’ve slowly switched to wine. You’ve moved from spirits like brännvin to wine.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Viggo, stroking his sleeping daughter’s head.

  Ludmila ignored him without comment.

  ‘But in Russia, or actually across the whole of Eastern Europe, vodka is getting even more of a hold. We’re on the way to becoming a lost cause.’

  ‘And not just for that reason, right?’ said Paul, drawing dangerously close to breaking the golden rule. A few of the others looked at him askance.

  The women in particular.

  ‘I’m utterly convinced,’ Ludmila continued, ‘that the condition of a nation can be measured by the proportion of wine in its total alcohol consumption. The greater the proportion of wine, the greater the spiritual prosperity.’