Europa Blues

by Arne Dahl

  ‘You’re completely right,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘So what are we going to do now then? Do you have any suggestions?’

  Yet more silence from Jena, though it felt different this time. A contemplative silence.

  ‘One more thing,’ said Herschel. ‘I know you think that this is just a case of academic preserve. I can hear it in your voice. But there is a more important aspect. Have you ever been to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin?’

  ‘No,’ said Holm.

  ‘Very few have. And that is the point. On no condition can it be allowed to become a place of pilgrimage for the emerging neo-Nazi groups. History and scientific truth must be weighed against experience. It is a pragmatic question. Which is of most benefit to democracy? The truth or silence?’

  ‘So we’re talking about a potential new shrine for neo-Nazis?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ernst Herschel.

  ‘I understand,’ said Kerstin Holm.

  Another moment’s silence. Herschel was thinking about the rapid rise of neo-Nazism in the undemocratically schooled former GDR. Holm was thinking about the Erinyes. She wondered whether her image of them was changing.

  Eventually, she said: ‘I really do understand your concerns, Professor Herschel. It’s an entirely justified worry for the future. But surely the future also has to be weighed up against the present. And your professional secrecy against mine. What I’m about to tell you is highly classified.’

  Again, silence from Jena. Yet another kind. A listening silence.

  Kerstin Holm continued.

  ‘I’m currently working alongside a few other European countries within the framework of a joint investigation. So far, in just over a year, seven people have been murdered in Sweden, Hungary, Slovenia, England, Italy and Germany. Each was killed by being hung upside down from a rope, and having a very particular kind of sharp wire driven into their temples and wiggled around in the pain centre of their cerebral cortex.’

  Silence from Jena. Gradually accepting, gradually becoming more willing.

  ‘I see,’ Ernst Herschel said finally. ‘The future is already here.’

  ‘You could put it that way, yes.’

  ‘Who is behind it?’

  ‘We don’t know, but we’ve been calling them the Erinyes.’

  More silence from Jena. The silence of preparation. Then the floodgates opened.

  ‘Weimar was a dilapidated GDR city when the Wall came down,’ the professor began. ‘Ten years later it was – with sixty thousand inhabitants – the European capital of culture. It was where Cranach, Bach, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, Liszt, Nietzsche, Strauss, Böcklin and the Bauhaus architects lived and worked. It was the cradle of the first German democracy. It was where the Nazis held their very first meeting. It was where the Hitler Youth was born. It was where Buchenwald was built – initially Nazi Germany’s biggest concentration camp, and then the Soviet Union’s. The best and the worst of European culture has taken place here.’

  The professor paused.

  ‘A few years after the Wall fell, some people entered a dilapidated and bombed-out building not far from the heart of Weimar, in Weimarhallen Park. It had been boarded up since the war. In the basement, they found the remains of a medical research institution. It was obvious that it had been abandoned in a hurry but that they had tried their utmost to remove all traces of themselves. The remaining archives had been torn up and some of them had been burnt. There were cells with extremely thick windowpanes and a couple of soundproofed research rooms. I was called in immediately and made sure that not a word got out to the press. I gathered together a small group of researchers. We went through every single inch of that place in minute detail; it took several years. What we are now working on is processing the results. The building was completely renovated a few years ago.’

  ‘What kind of institution was it?’ Kerstin Holm asked breathlessly.

  ‘It was called the Pain Centre,’ said Ernst Herschel.

  On the other side of the thin wall, Paul Hjelm was reading on in Leonard Sheinkman’s diary.

  It was all becoming much clearer.

  The people in the building were in a queue, waiting to be subjected to an experiment which robbed them of their souls through a tiny hole in their temples, small enough for a dressing to cover the wound.

  ‘Erwin died of pain.’

  At the same time, the Allies’ bombs were falling just round the corner. Leonard Sheinkman was coming closer and closer to the top of the list. Eventually, he reached it. The diary ended just as he was about to be taken away. Instead, he was liberated. He was saved by the bell. He emigrated to Sweden and obliterated his terrible past.

  Two things of note were mentioned, Paul Hjelm thought with razor-sharp Western logic. Firstly, the church. Secondly, the tormentors.

  There seemed to have been three of them. Sheinkman wrote about them on 19 February. They seemed to have had different characters. ‘I do not know their names. They give no names. They are three anonymous murderers. They are not alike. Not even murderers are alike.’

  Sheinkman had had a kind of connection with one of them. ‘The kindest of them. He is less German than I, and very blond. He looks so sorrowful. He kills with sorrow in his eyes.’ That was the first one.

  ‘Not the other two. One kills out of curiosity. He is not cruel, simply cold. He watches, observes, writes.’ That was the second of them.

  And then the third. ‘But the man with the purple birthmark on his neck, a mark in the shape of a rhombus, he is cruel. He wants to kill. I have seen that look before. He wants you to suffer. Then you can die. Only then is he happy.’

  Paul Hjelm made notes, systematising it all.

  Tormentor 1: Very blond, not German, sorrowful.

  Tormentor 2: Ice cold, dedicated scientist.

  Tormentor 3: Cruel, sadistic, purple rhombus-shaped birthmark on throat.

  He couldn’t get anything else from it.

  On to the church, then. Where had Leonard Sheinkman’s wife and son been killed? It was a camp. ‘They were being taken to their deaths at the execution spot.’ In all likelihood, that really was Buchenwald. And following that, he had been moved. ‘And I ended up here.’

  Sheinkman had told his children it was in Buchenwald he was kept prisoner. If he wasn’t moved particularly far, then it could reasonably be assumed that he still considered himself to be in Buchenwald. An annexe of Buchenwald.

  In other words, in Weimar.

  The church. 18 February. That peculiar description of the physical appearance of time. ‘Time has a white base. That base may well be quadrangular. Then comes the black. The black is made up of three parts. The lowest of these is hexagonal. On three of these six surfaces, every other one, there are two windows set one above the other. The lower window is slightly larger than the upper. And immediately above the upper window, the next section begins; the middle. It is just as black and shaped like a small, domed cap. This is where the clock sits. Finally, the spire. The spire is black and looks to be needle-sharp.’

  Paul Hjelm went online and searched for Weimar. Sure enough, Allied bombs had rained down on the city in February 1945. He found an overview of its churches. There were pictures of each of them.

  The cathedral, Stadtkirche, was a big structure which had been destroyed during the war. It wasn’t the one. It wasn’t right at all. The city’s other big church was slightly further to the north. Jakobskirche. It was a white church with a black tower divided into three segments – first a hexagonal section with two windows above one another on each side, the lower one slightly bigger than the higher one. The next section was shaped like a little domed cap with a clock. At the very top, the spire, which looked as though it were needle-sharp.

  There was no doubt.

  It was Jakobskirche in Weimar that Leonard Sheinkman had been able to see from his window, likening it to time itself.

  On the other side of the thin wall, Kerstin Holm’s increasingly worthwhile – and increasingly awful – c
onversation with Ernst Herschel in Jena was continuing.

  ‘The Pain Centre?’ she said.

  ‘They called it the Pain Centre. They experimented with the brain’s pain centre. The cerebral cortex. The objective was for their research subjects to feel the most acute pain possible.

  ‘They developed the procedure gradually. From what we can tell, it started with simple pain experiments up in Buchenwald. The results were so promising that a separate annexe was established, probably under direct orders from Himmler himself. That was when the experimentation really took off. They came to realise that increased blood flow to the brain contributed to an enhancement of pain and started hanging their research subjects upside down as a result. The long wire was a development from that. They were clearly near to a breakthrough of some kind when the Americans reached Weimar. The archives stopped suddenly at the end of March. The Americans arrived in early April. They had probably heard rumours that the end was close, packed up and disappeared into thin air. No one has ever been brought to account for it. In actual fact, we had no idea the institution ever existed before we opened the doors. All other traces of it had been obliterated.’

  ‘Have the people responsible been identified?’ asked Kerstin Holm. She didn’t recognise her own voice.

  ‘Not entirely,’ said Ernst Herschel. ‘What we do know has been sent on to the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. Simon Wiesenthal, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kerstin replied in the same peculiar cawing voice. ‘And what do you know?’

  ‘That there were three officers as well as guard soldiers. All from the SS.’

  ‘Names?’

  ‘Only two of the three, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What are the names you have?’

  ‘Let me start by explaining the order of command. Two of the three were doctors. SS doctors, if you grasp the full extent of that term. These men were doctors and officers. The third wasn’t a doctor. He was the boss. The entire institution, the whole Pain Centre, they were his work. His name was Hans von Heilberg.

  ‘Naturally, he made sure to burn all documents relating to himself and his existence is otherwise only sporadically recorded in various war archives. After the war, there isn’t a trace of him. We wouldn’t have known he existed at all, wouldn’t have known that he was in charge of the institution, if he hadn’t been treated for a certain complaint by one of the doctors. He had a birthmark that had started bleeding and he was worried it was skin cancer. That was in August 1944. His worries were described by the doctor as “chronic hypochondria”.’

  ‘A birthmark?’

  ‘A birthmark on his throat. According to reports, it was shaped like a rhombus. That’s all we know about Hans von Heilberg’s appearance.’

  ‘And the doctors?’

  ‘We know very little about one of them. He made sure to get rid of all written evidence, but oddly enough he forgot a photograph, so we do at least have a picture of him. It’s actually the only picture we have of any of the three.’

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘I’ve been hesitating slightly, and I know you’ve noticed, Fräulein Holm. He represents a problem for you. For your entire neutral nation. The other SS doctor was Swedish.’

  ‘Swedish?’

  ‘We have the most information about him. He wasn’t as careful in getting rid of the evidence as the others. Perhaps he didn’t think he would survive. Perhaps he was indifferent to it all. His name was Anton Eriksson.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Kerstin.

  ‘I know that your country has finally started to get to grips with its national legacy from the Second World War, Fräulein Holm. You’ve unearthed some cannon fodder in the Waffen SS and things like that – but an SS man of that rank isn’t something you’ve come across yet. That was another of the reasons behind my initial reluctance. I asked myself whether I shouldn’t put the question to someone higher up first. But now I’ve said it. Do as you wish with it.’

  ‘I will,’ said Kerstin Holm.

  ‘I’ll fax the material over,’ said Herschel.

  They met in the corridor, in line with the thin wall that separated their offices. Each pointed at the other.

  ‘Weimar,’ they said in unison.

  Paul Hjelm and Kerstin Holm went into her office. They quickly recapped their respective discoveries for one another. Then they glanced at a fax which had just arrived. It was about Anton Eriksson. Accompanying it was an extremely blurry, almost completely black photograph of the third man.

  ‘Three men,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Tormentor 3 seems to have been identified. “Cruel, sadistic, purple rhombus-shaped birthmark on throat.” Hans von Heilberg. The boss himself.’

  ‘This photo doesn’t give us much,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘But your summary of tormentor 1 could easily be the Swede, Anton Eriksson. “Very blond, not German, sorrowful.” It seems most likely that the sorrowful one was the only man not to wipe out all traces of himself. He was probably being eaten up by his conscience even then.’

  ‘So should we assume that tormentor 2 – “ice-cold scientist” – is the unidentified man in the photograph? The fact that he wiped out all other traces of himself surely suggests a certain cool rationality?’

  They sat there for a moment, each of them thinking. Still, their thoughts were as one. It was as though nothing, no bones and no cartilage, separated their two brains from one another.

  ‘So what are we looking at here?’ Paul Hjelm asked eventually. ‘How did the Erinyes find out about this method of execution? Why are they using it to kill off pimps? And where the hell does Leonard Sheinkman come into all of this? He should’ve been executed – he was at the top of the list. But he made it. How?’

  Kerstin stepped in. ‘And why did he never tell anyone about any of this? If he had just told the world that this horrible place existed, all three of them could’ve been locked up. Or they could’ve started searching for them right after the war at least. But he kept it quiet for over fifty years instead.’

  ‘He turned a new page in his life,’ said Paul. ‘He obliterated his past. He didn’t want anything to do with it. He just removed it. Like a tumour.’

  ‘They must’ve found out about it from Herschel,’ said Kerstin, getting to her feet.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Erinyes can only have had one single source of information about the hanging upside down and the nail in the brain, and that’s the research group in Weimar.’

  ‘Ring him back and see who knew about it. Absolutely anyone involved. Who was the first to go into the building? Who did they tell? How did Herschel find out? What happened when he gathered his research group together? Who was involved? Were there any other staff? What happened when the building was completely renovated?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Kerstin, picking up the receiver.

  ‘But not quite,’ said Paul. ‘There are other possible sources. If Sheinkman survived, maybe others did too. The guard soldiers in the Pain Centre, for example. And then at least three others.’

  ‘Three war criminals who went underground over fifty years ago,’ Kerstin nodded.

  ‘Ring anyway,’ said Paul.

  Kerstin spoke with Ernst Herschel. He promised to try to put a list of all possible names together, including how and when the Erinyes might have found out about the method.

  ‘One more thing,’ Kerstin said into the handset. ‘Was there any kind of register of the research subjects?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ernst Herschel. ‘Though they’re just combinations of letters. No names. No individuals. Just letters. It must’ve been simplest that way.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Thanks again for your help. Prepare yourselves for a visit.’

  ‘What?’ asked the professor.

  ‘We’re sending a man,’ said Kerstin, hanging up.

  ‘Arto?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Our well-travelled friend.’

  And so they began – with a single pair of eyes and four interconnected cerebral
hemispheres – to read through the Swedish SS doctor’s documents.

  33

  ODESSA WAS A former beauty. That sounded like a quote from a tourist brochure.

  Arto Söderstedt was slightly disappointed that all of his expectations had been confirmed. Each worn-out, vodka-soaked alcoholic he passed – and they weren’t few and far between – was a potential robber, and he was constantly being accosted by beggars, primarily children, asking him to buy dog-eared postcards for astronomical prices. The city also had a very particular scent. Like a past-it whore, he thought brutally to himself. Cheap perfume to disguise the decay.

  He still hadn’t been given the opportunity to cajole the reluctant Eastern European policemen and women without computers into cooperating with him; he was walking around, waiting for them to start work. ‘A bit later, maybe,’ a neighbour to the police station had reeled off in muddled German.

  He had no real reason to go back to the hotel either. With its combination of extravagance and decay, it stood like a symbol of Odessa. And so he was wandering. He made his way to the water’s edge – which wasn’t there. Odessa was a port city with a slight quirk: it sat a few hundred metres above the water. The only thing linking the city to the water were those world-famous steps down which the pushchair had bounced in Eisenstein’s revolutionary Battleship Potemkin. Before those stairs were built in the nineteenth century, there had been no direct link between city and water, between Odessa and the Black Sea.

  The city had been powerful once, and it probably still did make a striking impression from down on the water. But walking through it, Söderstedt thought it felt shabby above all else. A relic of a bygone era. Transport to Ukraine’s most important port was carried out along other routes these days, of course, but back then, the liveliness of the steps had been clear. It was no coincidence that it had been used as a symbol of capitalist economics in Eisenstein’s film.

  At least that was how Arto Söderstedt interpreted it.