by Arne Dahl
He squatted down to look at Hans von Heilberg’s face. Just like the way in which the man himself had looked at the hundreds of victims whose dental gold had formed the basis of his financial activities in Milan. Activities which, in turn, laid the basis for his criminal empire.
Everything went hand in hand.
Hans von Heilberg’s shirt collar had been ripped back. A purple, rhombus-shaped birthmark shone dark against his pale skin.
From his temple, a long, sharp, stiff nail. The steely look in his eyes had been obliterated by the pain.
Time was slowly righting itself once more.
‘Are you there, Magda?’ Söderstedt asked, looking at di Spinelli’s glassy, lifeless eyes.
A faint shifting behind his back confirmed that she was.
They all were.
But when he turned round, he couldn’t see a soul.
He smiled.
And then he said, to the room, straight into the incomprehensible: ‘Thank you.’
38
IT WAS HIGH summer in Stockholm, the sun low in the unusually deep blue sky. And yet this time, it wasn’t at all as though an opera scenographer had tried to imitate nature.
It may not quite have been nature, but at least it was more like nature than before.
Than it had been a few weeks before.
Nature is the terribly awful truth.
The last time Paul Hjelm had been on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö, he had enjoyed a long, deep and open-hearted conversation with Leonard Sheinkman’s son. Though in actual fact, Leonard Sheinkman’s only son had died, right there, twenty years earlier. The man he had spoken to wasn’t Leonard Sheinkman’s son at all. He was the mass murderer and Nazi Anton Eriksson’s son. He was a Jewish man named Harald Sheinkman who now needed to be brought up to date about the whole sorry state of affairs.
About the fact his father was a Nazi, not a Jew.
About the fact his father was an executioner, not a victim.
About the fact his father hadn’t written the yellowed pages of that diary, but stolen it and used it to build a background for himself.
About the fact his father had managed to cause the worst pain imaginable by experimenting on guinea pig after guinea pig in a nightmare cellar in Weimar.
About the fact his father had murdered women and children.
How far did the limits of atonement really stretch?
The Pain Centre.
Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue streamed through the old Audi. That was precisely how Paul Hjelm felt.
Kind of Blue.
He said: ‘What is it you’re going through?’
Kerstin Holm turned to look at him.
Her own crisis had stopped short. The Erinyes were dominating her thoughts now. They didn’t leave room for much else.
They dealt out justice, their very own kind of justice. One which consisted of revenge – no more, no less. They took revenge on behalf of unavenged injustices.
So what exactly distinguished them from state-sanctioned death penalties?
She didn’t know. At times, they seemed almost fascistic. At times, rightful avengers. Sometimes, they were nothing more than terrorists. Sometimes, they were repressed but utterly vital mythical forces.
One thing was clear: the Erinyes would never become Eumenides. They would never allow themselves to be neutralised by the lightweight society in which they lived.
Because that was what life in the West was – lightweight: easily lived, easily digested, easily fucked. The unbearable lightness of being. An all-American Existence Light. Filled with chemical sweetener that killed infinitely more quickly than real sugar ever did.
That was the essence of her crisis. Her … metamorphosis. Even if the word did seem slightly grand. Pretentious, even – and if there was one thing no one wanted to be, it was pretentious. That was where everyone drew the line.
The thing she was searching for was the free zone, that place where the primitive forces had free rein to bubble away undisturbed. That bubble we never fail to pop before it gets too big. The one she could feel the virtual presence of every time she sang with the choir, allowing her voice to rise up towards the high vaulted ceilings and letting the choir’s tones surround her like a warm, comforting embrace. Religious? Mmm. But without a sense of the holy, our sense of the unholy also withers away. And we need to retain that. Otherwise we die.
That was roughly how it was. But how best to phrase it?
Maybe something like this:
‘It’s a bit tricky to explain. But don’t worry. I’m just brooding, causing myself grief.’
Paul Hjelm chuckled. ‘Story of my life,’ he said.
They were silent for a moment. The distance between them wasn’t especially big. There were no watertight doors keeping them apart. It was all leaking through. No, it wasn’t possible to understand someone else completely. But what about yourself?
So what, as Miles Davis was playing.
The image in each of their minds was, at least, the same. Hultin’s whiteboard. First, five names. At the bottom, the two who had fled the Ghiottone and Odessa together with Magda in August 1997. Above, three upper-case names in red: Magda Kouzmin, Magda Sheinkman, Elena Basenow. Three names, one woman. Alongside it, an e-fit image put together by Arto Söderstedt and Ernst Herschel. Arto had, in the strictest confidence, told them he suspected Herschel would find it easier to describe her vagina than he did her face, but they managed to put a picture together regardless. A picture of a face and nothing else. They had shown it to Adib Tamir too, and he had confirmed it. That was what she looked like, the bitch who cut Hamid in two.
Arto Söderstedt was fine. He was missing four teeth, wearing peculiar-looking braces and only able to sip Vin Santo through a straw. He was also talking quite strangely. But otherwise, he seemed happier than ever.
It looked doubtful he would ever come home again.
Next to the e-fit of Magda were four photographs, or rather three more e-fits and one proper photograph. They still had just one of the other Erinyes on film, and that was the woman with the mobile phone in Gdynia. Two were the e-fits that Jadwiga from the M/S Stena Europe had composed, and the third had been put together by a salesman from a superstore in Bromma to which Jorge, with great finesse, had managed to trace the red-and-purple-striped rope. The salesman could remember selling it to a woman dressed in black. He had assumed she was an Eastern European working girl and started hitting on her. She had paid in the form of 120 kronor and a kick to the groin. That was why he remembered her so well, and she was none of the four they knew of. That meant she was likely one of those who had taken part in the hangings in Skansen and Södra Begravningsplatsen. In Palazzo Riguardo too, in all probability.
Suddenly, the kick to the groin seemed almost gentle. Practically a caress.
There they hung in any case, five sharp female faces with a slight Slavic look to them.
All unidentified apart from Magda Kouzmin.
Europe was now on the hunt for them, and it was all their fault.
The A-Unit’s fault.
Neither Paul nor Kerstin were quite sure it was a good thing.
This was a case where plenty of guilty parties had been identified but not a single one had been arrested. Time had somehow set itself right, though; it had caught up with itself. And Jan-Olov Hultin looked fit as a fiddle. Not a stroke in sight. No black hole in the space–time continuum. A newly found sense of clairvoyance, perhaps, but they could live with that. Even Hultin.
They had finally had a response from the phone company in Ukraine. The phone from Odenplan had, on a number of occasions, made calls to two different numbers in Milan. Sometimes they had been to Palazzo Riguardo, presumably threatening calls, and sometimes to a nearby hotel room, where it wasn’t entirely implausible to imagine a couple of the Erinyes sitting and waiting, mapping out di Spinelli’s entire life. Aside from that, a large number of calls to and from Slagsta. Nothing else of interest.
‘Should we go in the
n?’ Paul Hjelm asked. ‘Should we go in and ruin Harald Sheinkman’s life just as he’s starting to get back on his feet?’
It was their job.
They both looked up at the beautiful house on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö. Before them, they could see a man without a nose practically skipping up to the house, brushing the roses with his hands and breathing in the scents of the garden through the hole he had in the place of a nose, before reaching its handsome front door and saying to himself: ‘To think that Pappa did so well when I did so badly. But now, now my life’s wounds will heal. As soon as I’m reunited with Pappa, who I loved when we lived in Berlin, who comforted me every night in the terrible Buchenwald. Then I’ll return to Odessa and take Magda from that awful orphanage where everyone becomes an addict or a whore, and we’ll move here to beautiful Sweden, and finally become a proper family again.’
Just a few seconds later, he was dead.
Should Anton Eriksson really be allowed to ruin his own child’s life too? Posthumously?
‘Like hell,’ said Kerstin, doing up her seat belt.
‘What about the truth?’ Paul asked, doing the same.
‘Enough’s enough.’
Paul Hjelm laughed, turned the ignition key and swung out onto Bofinksvägen.
Anton Eriksson could remain the man he had spent half his life believing he was. Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman.
The Nobel Prize candidate.
Hopefully he had, somehow, reconciled with his falsified life before he died.
Paul Hjelm accelerated and turned up the volume.
It was how they felt. Exactly how.
Kind of Blue.
39
AND THEN THE thing he had only dreamt of happened.
She came to visit him. ‘A ray of sunshine,’ as Anja said later that evening.
She just turned up. Arto was sitting on the veranda, slurping Vin Santo through a straw and enjoying life, and Anja went to open the door.
She came out onto the veranda and said: ‘It’s your colleague from the Italian police.’
Could it be Marconi? he wondered. They had already said goodbye.
He turned round and there she was.
She looked just like she had in Weimar. Slightly nervous and clutching a little handbag tightly in her hands.
‘Herr Söderstadt,’ she said cautiously.
His jaw dropped. It really was her.
It was Magda Kouzmin.
It was Magda Sheinkman.
It was Elena Basedow.
He couldn’t help but laugh, only for a short, short moment.
She didn’t look so violently homicidal. Erinye from 9 until 5.
He asked her to sit down. She thanked him and did so. He didn’t know where to begin and apparently nor did she. They sat in silence instead, watching the children run around, their heads bobbing like chess pieces out there among the greenery. Five white-haired and now four black-haired heads. Their group of friends was slowly but surely growing.
‘I admire you,’ she said. ‘You’re living. I’m something else.’
‘My mother’s uncle murdered your grandfather,’ said Arto Söderstedt.
There were opening lines and then there were opening lines …
She turned to him and smiled.
‘I guessed he was a relative.’
‘He only died recently. I inherited his money. All this, it’s a false paradise. It’s your money. And many, many others’. I still don’t know whether I should tell the world that Pertti Lindrot, the war hero, was a real bastard. I don’t know – should I sacrifice my children’s happiness for that?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Pertti Lindrot?’
‘Yes. From Finland.’
‘The third man,’ she nodded. ‘We never managed to identify him. It was impossible. Eventually I found out that there was, at least, a picture of him and that Herschel had it in Weimar. I went there and slept with him and copied the photo. Right after that, he asked me to pick up the spitting image of a man I’d just seen in a sixty-year-old photo from the railway station. It was a bit odd.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Söderstedt. ‘He drank himself to death. Slowly but surely. That’s the redeeming part of his existence.’
‘Maybe,’ Magda Kouzmin said after a moment. ‘I made sure to check the birthmark on his neck, by the way.’
‘How did you get into the palace?’
‘Same way you did. One after another, nice and calmly. Just a few hours earlier. They had no idea. They were waiting for you, not for us. They’d been following you. They were on to you the entire time.’
‘How do you know?’
‘We were watching them.’
‘So they were following me and you were following them?’
‘Yes. What I want to know is: how did you identify me?’
He looked at her. Was she here on business after all? That didn’t feel good.
She could immediately see it in his face.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not my intention to snoop. All I really wanted to ask for was my grandfather’s diary.’
‘It should be yours,’ said Söderstedt. ‘But I only have a copy. You can have it.’
‘Thank you.’
And then he told her. Against his better judgement, he told her.
‘I found you through your father. That was when I understood the scope of what you’d been through.’
‘My fate is hardly unique,’ she said. ‘It’s … European.’
He chuckled bitterly and said: ‘My turn to get technical. How did you find out about the method? What made you seek out the research group in Weimar?’
‘The Ghiottone took over our brothel in Odessa. That was back when Marco di Spinelli still left his palace. He visited us. He wanted to “test the girls”, he said. He seemed to like me a lot, because he started boasting about his disgusting war crimes in the throes of passion. That was always when he was horniest. He mentioned Weimar one day. There and then, I decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. That was how it all started. Taking out di Spinelli, that was the plan. And the method he described sounded good. About that time, we were constantly being abused by his sleazy henchman, Artemij Tolkatjenko, so once we’d made up our minds, it made sense to start with him. Wherever he was. It turned out he’d gone to England. Manchester. And then we just started seeking out other horrible pimps, that was all. We were always on the way to Marco di Spinelli though.’
‘So is it over now? The Erinyes will become Eumenides?’
‘We’ll see,’ Magda said, smiling shyly. ‘Once we left Odessa and got on top of the drugs, I went to Weimar to see what he’d been doing there during the war. It was all so secretive, but eventually – using fake grades – I ended up at the Pain Centre, helping out with all the crappy jobs they had. I realised that was where he’d been. And while I was there, I kept looking. I was often alone there at nights. Eventually, I found one of those wires and I started to understand how it worked. I also found some papers from an archive. It was a hell of a shock. The name Leonard Sheinkman was mentioned in connection to some diary. It said that he was dead and that the so-called “Swede” had taken care of his diary. I realised he was my real grandfather. Dad had told me his name was Sheinkman when he was little and that his father had been taken away from Buchenwald. I burnt the paper and memorised it all. The memories are all I have. What I work with. I found a file about my dad too, later on – just a couple of loose sheets. There were some notes about a ferry headed for Stockholm, and in the phone directory for Stockholm I found a Leonard Sheinkman. My grandfather’s name. I realised it must be the so-called “Swede”. He was pretending to be my grandfather. And he had killed my father. Both my dad and my grandpa. The same man had killed them both.’
‘You hung him above your father’s grave. He was on his way there.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know that,’ Magda said, looking genuinely surprised. ‘He’d been going around on the metro for a few days, a
s though he was on the way somewhere. He was probably catching up with himself and his crimes.’
‘Speaking of the metro,’ said Arto Söderstedt. ‘You said you’d only killed serious criminals, murderers and people who’ve abused women. Those three thugs in Palazzo Riguardo were also serious criminals, and you knew that in advance?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what about the metro in Stockholm? Odenplan? The person who stole your phone, he was just an immigrant. His name was Hamid al-Jabiri. Did he deserve to be ripped to shreds?’
‘No,’ Magda said unhappily. ‘That just happened.’
‘Adrenalin?’
‘Probably.’
‘Can’t you see this is all starting to get out of control? Soon, the violence will be an intrinsic value. Soon, you’ll be just as speed-blind as the Baader–Meinhof or ETA or the IRA. Everyone will be an enemy. Everyone but you will be worthy of death.’
Söderstedt paused and placed his hand on Magda’s. He really was trying to express himself clearly. Lives might depend on it.
‘Stop this now,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for it any more. You got di Spinelli. Everyone involved in your grandfather’s death is gone. You saved my life and I’m begging you now: stop this. It’s dragging us into some other kind of society, and both that society and its opponents are becoming increasingly undemocratic. That’s all that will end up happening. The only thing you’re really killing is democracy. It’s fragile and it’s important. Despite everything. So stop it now.’
Arto Söderstedt felt like Athena in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
I will not weary of soft words to thee,
That never mayst thou say, Behold me spurned,
An elder by a younger deity,
And from this land rejected and forlorn.
Eventually, the leader of the Erinyes replied: ‘Lo, I desist from wrath, appeased by thee.’ And the Erinyes became Eumenides.
But that was poetry.
This was something else.
‘I don’t think it’s possible any more,’ Magda replied with a faint smile. ‘Even if I wanted to.’
He nodded.
‘I tried, anyway,’ he said.
