Europa Blues

by Arne Dahl

  But now, the steps seemed to be nothing more than a refuge for all kinds of riff-raff, beggars and junkies, and walking down them presented visitors with an immediate health risk. Before Söderstedt ventured down, he nipped over to some shrubbery and broke off a branch. It looked like a walking stick, but in reality it was a weapon. He was ready to defend himself. Not that it could look that way.

  He walked down and he walked back up. He counted seventeen more potential attackers, beggars dressed as postcard sellers. In addition to that – despite all attempts to defend himself with the branch – he made it back up with three splashes of vodka on his clothes. Fortunately no vomit.

  He paused at the top of the steps with the branch in his hand. In the nearest shop window, Uncle Pertti was standing with his hand on his sabre. Arto stared at him, bewitched. Uncle Pertti stared back. Arto dropped the branch. Uncle Pertti dropped the sabre. Arto stuck out his tongue. Uncle Pertti did the same.

  The spell was broken.

  What did the old devil want? Söderstedt wondered, leaving him behind among the boots in the shop window. Why this obstinacy?

  He wandered along the grand old promenade and looked out over the cold, dark surface of the Black Sea, glittering beautifully in the morning sun. He noticed that with each moment that passed, he was becoming more favourably inclined to the city. It had a beauty which wasn’t ingratiating, the way the beauty of Italian cities often could be. It was a beauty which didn’t try to hide its faults. Instead, it seemed to be saying: here I am, take it or leave it. More or less like Uncle Pertti.

  He walked past the famous opera house and university. The buildings really were beautiful. He wasn’t even sure that the decay was tragic any more. Perhaps the march of time should be preserved in works of art. Perhaps it shouldn’t be restored and adorned and tarted up and masqueraded as something it wasn’t. Corroded by time – like everything else on earth. Should art really be lifted up and furnished with an eternal value that was, in its very foundation, false? Even if the alternative was obliteration? If time was nothing but a saboteur, a destroyer of eternal values? If that was the case, shouldn’t it be withstood?

  It was the classic argument of the plastic surgeon …

  Just as he was starting to feel as though something truly substantial was on the way, he arrived – without really having planned it – back at the police station. This time, the door was open.

  He ambled about its decayed old corridors and remarked to himself that he was using the word ‘decay’ a little too often. If this exact corridor had been in Sweden or Finland, would he still have thought of it as decayed? Or was it simply the case that the word was inseparably associated with this particular city? Irrevocably linked to Odessa?

  That was when it struck him that Odessa wasn’t just a city. It was also an organisation. A particularly unpleasant organisation. Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen. The Organisation of Former SS Members. Founded in 1947 with the sole intention of helping high-ranking Nazis gain new identities in South America and the Middle East. Replaced by the Kameradenwerke in 1952.

  He couldn’t quite get the context straight, but it was there. He felt it a little more keenly as he knocked on a door bearing Cyrillic letters reading something along the lines of ‘Commissioner Alexej Svitlytjnyj’. The name of the man he was looking for, at least.

  Alexej Svitlytjnyj was sitting at his desk and had been forewarned. Just as Söderstedt had suspected, there was no computer on his superbly crafted desk. There was, however, an oddly shaped cigarette hanging from the mouth of the big, composed man in the impeccable Eastern European suit. It looked like one of the suits Soviet leaders used to wear when they stood on a platform above Red Square, waving stiffly to the military parades passing by below. Arto Söderstedt had always suspected that those men had been stuffed and remote-controlled.

  Svitlytjnyj was neither, but he was, however, rather apathetic. His English was also surprisingly eloquent.

  ‘I checked with the Ministry of Justice,’ he said once their introductions were over and done with. ‘As a representative of Europol, it’s perfectly OK for you to access our investigatory materials. But sending it halfway across the world to the Swedish police was a different matter.’

  ‘So have you managed to identify the noseless man?’ asked Söderstedt.

  Svitlytjnyj nodded gravely like an old brown bear.

  He looks like a Nevalyashka doll, Söderstedt thought, happy to make use of a long-neglected word from his childhood. Like one of those little plastic dolls with big round heads which teetered back and forth for all eternity when you set them in motion.

  ‘That’s correct,’ Svitlytjnyj eventually said, sluggishly holding out a dog-eared brown folder with a hammer and sickle on the cover. ‘From the Soviet days,’ he added with a gesture to the Communist hammer and sickle symbol. ‘That was another part of the problem when it came to sharing the material.’

  Söderstedt opened the file and stared down into a forest of Cyrillic letters.

  ‘It’s in Russian,’ he said thoughtlessly.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ said Svitlytjnyj. ‘It’s Ukrainian. A language spoken by seven times more people than Swedish.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Söderstedt replied courteously.

  ‘Turn the page,’ said Svitlytjnyj. ‘There’s a photograph.’

  Söderstedt did as he was told. Staring at him was an utterly strange figure with a dark gaze.

  The figure had no nose.

  ‘His name was Kouzmin,’ the commissioner said, taking a deep drag from his cigarette. By this point, there were only about four millimetres of it left. Söderstedt wondered how it would all pan out – would it last another drag?

  ‘Koutjschmin?’ he tried.

  Svitlytjnyj nodded sideways and made a bobbing motion with his hand.

  ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Franz Kouzmin. His criminal record isn’t particularly extensive. Mostly linked to a long-standing, intense vodka habit. Petty crimes. Break-ins, receiving stolen goods, drunkenness. Hardly a major criminal. He was reported missing by his daughter at the end of September 1981. Apparently he was a widower.’

  ‘Does it say anything about his nose?’ Söderstedt asked.

  ‘His missing nose,’ Svitlytjnyj said, getting to his feet; it took him almost thirty seconds. ‘Might I suggest we carry on in the computer room?’

  A mystery, Söderstedt thought. The minuscule cigarette had disappeared without a trace. In its place was a freshly rolled, newly lit cigarette. The switch had taken place without him, the seasoned Finnish-Swedish detective, noticing a thing.

  ‘You’ve got a computer room?’ he asked distractedly, getting up.

  Svitlytjnyj chuckled and took a long drag.

  ‘You weren’t expecting that, were you?’ he said.

  They went out into the corridor and wandered through all eternity.

  ‘We’re busy transferring the old archive over to the new computer system,’ the commissioner said. ‘And taking the opportunity to translate it all into English. It takes time. We’re up to “L”. You’re in luck.’

  ‘What about the nose?’ Söderstedt persisted.

  ‘The missing nose,’ Svitlytjnyj persisted, opening a door.

  The room they entered was a hackers’ paradise. All the computers seemed to be the latest possible models. Several men and women were tapping away at keys on trendy, lightning-fast terminals. The impression it gave was more American stock-market company than Ukrainian police department.

  ‘You look a bit dumbfounded,’ Svitlytjnyj said with a smile.

  ‘How can you afford all this?’ Söderstedt blurted out undiplomatically.

  ‘Mafia money,’ the commissioner said with a straight face.

  Several others in the room burst into laughter.

  ‘Let me brief you,’ Svitlytjnyj continued. And so, in peace and quiet – and in perfect English – Arto Söderstedt read the files on Franz Kouzmin.

  His twelve-year-old daugh
ter, who had been living in an orphanage at the time, had reported him missing at the end of September, when she had gone for her monthly visit. His wife had died of cancer just two years after the daughter was born, and when his alcoholism worsened, she had been taken away and placed into an orphanage. There were excerpts from an interview with her.

  ‘Dad had just stopped drinking,’ she had said. ‘He’d been completely clean for a month. And really, really happy.’ Though she had no idea why.

  OK, Söderstedt thought, checking himself. Kouzmin stopped drinking and was happy, expectant. Like a man going on a trip. A trip to Sweden. He had clearly found something, and that something made him fight a long-standing alcohol problem and board the M/S Cosmopolit, bound for Frihamnen in Stockholm.

  He read on.

  Suddenly, the nose question was solved. He should have guessed. They all should have.

  Franz Kouzmin had been adopted by a Ukrainian woman who had taken care of him in Buchenwald, where his parents had died. He had been subjected to a medical experiment related to breathing. An investigation into how important the airways in the nose were for the human ability to breathe.

  To answer that question, the SS doctors in Buchenwald had sawn off little Franz’s nose.

  It turned out it was possible to live without one.

  Good to know.

  Things had become more difficult for him later on in life. But if someone had sawn off my nose, Arto Söderstedt thought, I probably would have turned to alcohol too.

  And then he found it.

  A name.

  He phoned Stockholm.

  Jan-Olov Hultin answered. He said: ‘I was just about to ring you, Arto. You’ve got to go to Weimar.’

  Arto Söderstedt simply ignored him.

  ‘Listen carefully to what I’m about to say,’ he said, focusing on the computer screen in front of him.

  ‘I’m listening,’ said Hultin.

  ‘Our man without a nose, “Shtayf” from Södra Begravningsplatsen, was called Franz Kouzmin. That wasn’t his birth name, though. He was born to a Jewish home in Berlin in January 1935. His name was Franz Sheinkman.’

  There was silence at the other end of the line.

  ‘My God,’ said Hultin.

  ‘You could say that,’ said Söderstedt.

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘He was a widower and an alcoholic and had just stopped drinking. He crept out of the Soviet Union in good spirits and set off to Sweden, or more precisely to his father Leonard Sheinkman’s house on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö. Somehow, he’d managed to find out where his father was living. It was enough to make him stop drinking. His father thought Franz was dead – dead along with his wife in Buchenwald. But that’s not what happened. He wasn’t killed, he was subjected to medical experiments; they deliberately sawed his nose off. So, on the evening of the fourth of September 1981, he arrived at his father’s house on Bofinksvägen. We don’t know what happened when they met, but what we do know is that the very same evening, he was stabbed to death and found next to a little lake nearby.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hultin.

  ‘You see what?’

  ‘That you’ve done a fantastic job. Can you send the files over? Will they allow that?’

  ‘I think so,’ Söderstedt said, glancing up at the great Alexej Svitlytjnyj. His cigarette was tiny once more, but Söderstedt was forced to admit that he had lost interest in it.

  ‘You can go to Weimar now then,’ said Hultin. ‘You need to meet a Professor Ernst Herschel from the history department at the University of Jena. Get there as quickly as you can. We can deal with any further instructions on the way.’

  ‘Give me a hint,’ Söderstedt pleaded.

  ‘The institution where the nail in the brain experiment was developed.’

  ‘Ah,’ Söderstedt replied, hanging up.

  Svitlytjnyj sucked the microscopic cigarette butt into his mouth, quickly doused it with a little pooled spit, spat it out and had another immediately ready rolled. He lit it as he leaned forward over the computer and helped Arto Söderstedt navigate the Cyrillic letters on-screen.

  And just like that, Franz Kouzmin-Sheinkman’s files were sent flying across Europe.

  Söderstedt wondered whether he hadn’t simply been asked to come to Odessa to admire their computers and spread a little goodwill among the Common European police community.

  He said: ‘I need to copy the files for my own use, too.’

  He was handed a disk and the computer asked him: ‘Save Kouzmin?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. With emphasis.

  34

  ANTON ERIKSSON WAS born in 1913, in a small town called Örbyhus to the north of Stockholm. At the age of twenty, he enrolled as a student at the university in Uppsala and, after reading a range of subjects including medicine, German and anthropology, transferred to the grand old university town’s most famous independent institution: the State Institute for Racial Biology. The institution had been founded in 1922, the very same year the Swedish Social Democrats had recommended the forced sterilisation of mentally handicapped people on the basis of ‘the eugenic dangers inherent in the reproduction of the feeble-minded’. It was the world’s first institution for the study of eugenics and later served as a standard for Kaiser Wilhelm’s Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin.

  The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Eugenics was, in turn, an important precondition for the Holocaust. Though its roots were, of course, much deeper. The early twentieth century had been a time of great change – Sweden was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial society – and in times of upheaval, the need for a scapegoat always arises. The Jews were an obvious choice, since they could just as easily be accused of bolshevism as of capitalism and anti-patriotism – it was simply a matter of choosing which.

  Racial thinking of this kind was also linked to the popular science of the time: anthropology and genetics. The Swedish Society for Eugenics had been founded in 1909, and there was also an international society of racial biology which met regularly to discuss how best to produce an Übermensch. When they held their grandiose world congress in London in 1912, none other than Winston Churchill had been the chairman. In 1918, a professor from the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm had suggested that a Nobel Institute of Racial Biology should be established, but the time was not yet ripe. In 1921, however, a motion supported by representatives from each of the governing parties was launched, advocating the founding of the State Institute for Racial Biology. The motion was passed by a large majority in Sweden’s Riksdag, and the institute opened on New Year’s Day, 1922. At its head was Herman Lundborg, with seven staff and an annual budget of sixty thousand kronor.

  Herman Lundborg believed that the Nordic race was superior to all others, and as the years went by, he became increasingly drawn to anti-Semitic standpoints. The institute was also influenced by Lundborg’s fondness for Germany. He invited a number of Germans to give lectures at the institute, among them Hans F. Günther, who would later become the Nazi ideologue in all matters racial. When the State Institute for Racial Biology held its world congress in New York in 1932, Herman Lundborg was there, as was much of the American upper class, with families like the Kelloggs, the Harrimans and the Roosevelts at the centre of it all. The chairman of the meeting was Ernst Rüdin, a man who would, in just a few short years, be at the fore of Hitler’s extensive programme of sterilisation.

  By that point in time, the State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala had started to stagnate, despite its firmly rooted international reputation. The annual budget had been lowered to thirty thousand kronor and Lundborg was becoming increasingly untenable as head of the institute. In 1936, he was replaced by Gunnar Dahlberg, a man who, to a certain degree, changed the direction of the institute, with its focus shifting from racial biology to human genetics and social engineering. This shift eventually culminated in the now-notorious programme of forced sterilisations carried out on many of Sweden’s me
ntally handicapped citizens.

  Anton Eriksson’s involvement with the institute came towards the end of Herman Lundborg’s tenure. He had a great deal of sympathy for Lundborg’s eugenic and anti-Semitic thinking, and when Dahlberg took over Eriksson regarded the change in direction as a betrayal of Lundborg’s legacy. Medical and surgical-orientated racial biology was what interested him.

  In the material from Weimar, they found a short text written by Anton Eriksson which had been published in the pro-German Aftonbladet tabloid in the spring of 1936. In the article, Eriksson attempted, using an utterly clinical line of reasoning, to prove the biologically determined inferiority of Jews. As evidence for his thesis, he made use of Herman Lundborg’s famous sketches of human profiles.

  In early 1937, Anton Eriksson left Sweden to study in Berlin. The last mention of him suggested he was involved with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Institute of Eugenics and that he had been admitted to the internal officer training line within the SS.

  Then it all went quiet for the talented young man from Örbyhus. Very quiet.

  Kerstin Holm and Paul Hjelm read through the file together. They were utterly silent and there was no distance between them.

  They could feel Sweden’s history changing before their eyes. Who had told them about this when they were at school? Who had told them about their humane, neutral, Nordic country’s dark inheritance?

  No one.

  The black hole in the space–time continuum was starting to fill up.

  And the spanner in the works, the fundamental error in their thinking, was fast approaching.

  Time was starting to right itself.

  Not least thanks to Arto Söderstedt’s remarkable new information from Odessa.

  They had seen nothing so far which suggested that Anton Eriksson, on his way to becoming an SS doctor, would have felt regret or suffered pangs of conscience over what he had done. To the contrary, he seemed more likely to be the ‘ice-cold scientist’ mentioned in Leonard Sheinkman’s diary.

  Tormentor number 2.

  So why would this rationally driven, methodically working anti-Semite leave behind damning evidence of the Pain Centre in Weimar? No photographs, of course – but plenty of material.