Ask No Mercy (Max Anger Book 1)

by Martin Österdahl

  He wrote Pashie’s name on a sheet of paper in one of his notebooks.

  “I think I have something for you. Something new, something you didn’t expect.”

  Max frowned. Could that have to do with his own research? Was that what had triggered everything? Pashie helping him with that research? He wrote “Borgenstierna” and “Wallentin” on a page in the notepad. Added “1944.” He put the pieces of paper up on the wall with plenty of space between them. Then he picked up the overview of the latest opinion poll, the one that had Zyuganov’s party, CPRF, ahead in almost all of Russia’s electoral districts, and put that up on the wall as well.

  Max took a step back, looked at one slip of paper and then the other. Let his thoughts drift. Was there a pattern?

  A knock on the door made Max turn around.

  When he opened it, Strebor stood there with his hand on his Kalashnikov. The weapon hung from a strap around his neck that was much too long, and it knocked against his knees every time he moved.

  “Was there something else?” Max asked.

  “Yes. I have a message for you from someone named Ilya. Apparently he’s awaiting you at Fontanka 44.”

  Fontanka lay along the river of the same name in the innermost core of Saint Petersburg. He’d spent some wet evenings there with Pashie.

  “Forty-four,” said Strebor, “is the only drinking establishment in Saint Petersburg where you cannot smoke.”

  Max nodded his thanks.

  To get to the club, he only had to take a quick walk along Nevsky Prospekt, over the Anichkov Bridge, and then right onto Fontanka.

  When darkness descended over the city, the otherwise lively main artery was emptied of people. There were few cars out, and the sidewalks were empty. The damp air was filled with a mess of particles visible in the bleak yellow glare of the streetlamps. At night the city created a completely different impression. The distances between the few hotels, which were the only places where you sensed there were people, seemed longer, and the surrounding buildings seemed gigantic in the darkness.

  Finally he arrived at the correct address, a narrow three-story building. Max walked up the steps to the door. Two fours were etched into the plaster of the facade.

  When he knocked, a beefy man in uniform immediately opened the door.

  The police? Max wondered for a second before he realized that this man belonged to an entirely different organization.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for Ilya,” said Max.

  The man looked him over. Then he smiled broadly and opened the door wide with a hoarse “Welcome.” He stepped aside to let Max pass. In his hand he held a half-empty bottle bearing the green-and-white label of Moskovskaya vodka.

  The sounds of live music and people talking met Max when he stepped through the door. On the walls of the narrow corridor hung plaques and remembrances of the organization that appeared to own the property. Portraits of leaders and dead heroes of the Saint Petersburg fire department also lined the hall.

  “The only drinking establishment in Saint Petersburg where you cannot smoke.” Now he understood.

  A warm red light grew in intensity as Max walked down the corridor. The sound of music became louder and louder. Finally he entered a room reminiscent of an officers’ mess in the classic Saint Petersburg style, with high ceilings, round sofas and chairs covered in red velvet, worn wood paneling, and brass chandeliers.

  In one corner a trio was playing a well-known Russian folk melody on accordion and balalaika. Firemen with rolled-up shirtsleeves and women in short skirts and high heels were kicking left and right with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

  A young woman in a short light-blue dress stumbled in her heels. The man at her side gripped her hip with a large, steady hand, pulled her close, and let his hand wander along her panty line.

  The woman’s body and hair resembled Pashie’s. In Vasaparken, two months ago, they had gone ice skating together. Max had worn his old hockey skates, and Pashie a pair she’d borrowed from one of Sarah’s friends. He’d had to keep a firm grip on her hands to keep her from falling.

  “I told you—I’m a girl from the south.”

  Max looked around for Ilya. There was no tobacco smoke in the air, but it was clear that safety rules were being neglected this evening; there were over a hundred firemen and just as many women present.

  In an attempt to blend in, Max went to the bar and asked for a beer. A group of young women, their hands stretched toward the ceiling, were dancing in the middle of the room. They seemed to be from the university; their dance was more modern than the music.

  An enormous man sitting at one of the tables turned around and smiled at Max. He was older than the women but younger than most of the firemen. His oily black hair was combed in a center part, and under his left eye a vein bulged like a root in a field.

  Ilya had really changed since Max had last seen him. He had a thick scar running across his neck, and his imposing muscle mass could only have been the result of steroid use. Despite all his hours in the gym, Max had shrunk in relation to his Russian friend.

  Ilya was in a splendid mood. He drew Max into a bear hug and kissed his cheeks.

  “Max,” he exclaimed.

  He gesticulated, and soon drinks arrived—including Sovetskoye Shampanskoye, beer, and vodka shots—for the whole table.

  “What are you doing here?” Max asked. “With the fire department?”

  Ilya offered Max a wide but wary smile.

  “I’m helping them out with certain purchases.”

  “So what are we celebrating?” asked Max, nodding at the dancing firemen.

  “That you are here, of course,” said Ilya, lifting his glass. “But you could have given me more than a few hours to get everyone together.”

  They drank to each other’s health; a little vodka sloshed out of their glasses and landed on the table. Ilya wiped off what had spilled with his hand and then wiped his hand on his jeans.

  “Have you been living in Saint Petersburg since the last time we saw each other?” Max asked.

  “No. I spent a little time in the Baltics. In Riga.” Ilya avoided Max’s gaze. “But that’s a closed chapter.”

  The musicians kicked off a new melody in a frenetic tempo. The room was approaching the boiling point.

  “Tell me about Riga,” said Max, leaning toward Ilya to make himself heard.

  Ilya shrugged. Max smelled the stink of alcohol on his breath. Ilya must have had quite a lot to drink by this point; nevertheless, he didn’t seem particularly intoxicated.

  “I helped a charitable organization with deliveries to a school for blind children. Antibiotics against cataracts. Simple, cheap medicine in the West; impossible for the children there to get hold of.”

  “Always on the side of the weak, or what, Ilya?”

  “You might remember my little brother Boris.”

  “Cataracts?”

  “Blind from the age of four, completely unnecessarily.” Ilya sipped his Baltika pilsner. “When I had been doing that for six months, I was . . . invited to the home of one of the teachers. She told me what happened to the shipments after they reached the school.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “The head of the school had some friends who drove everything to a warehouse outside the city. Then the medicine was sold to the children’s parents at extremely high prices. Medicine the children should have received free of charge. When I realized what their parents were having to go through to get the money, I lost it.”

  Max had seen what could happen when Ilya lost it.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “So that’s a closed chapter.” Ilya took another sip of his beer. “What brings you here?”

  While Max told Ilya about Pashie and how he wasn’t able to reach her, he no longer heard the music. When Max thought of her, the room spun around him, and he squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. He couldn’t lose his grip now.

&nb
sp; Ilya leaned over even closer when Max had finished. The party had gotten louder.

  “What does this woman mean to you, my friend?”

  Everything, Max wanted to say. Instead, he told Ilya about their work relationship and about what Pashie had been working on recently.

  “So this woman has pissed someone off? People are sensitive these days. Do you want me to help you find her? Is that why you called?”

  Max nodded.

  Ilya raised an eyebrow. He understood that Max hadn’t told him everything.

  An empty beer case flew through the room, and some firemen started wrestling. The trio began playing a new song, and soon everyone in the room was standing up and singing at the top of their lungs.

  Ilya ordered two double shots of vodka. It wasn’t easy to toss down a double shot of anything, especially vodka, in one go.

  “Come on—get up,” said Ilya. “This is the firemen’s march. Now the real party starts.”

  He put his arm around Max’s neck and pulled him close.

  “Now we’re going to drink as we used to, old friend. And tomorrow we’ll find your girlfriend.”

  Stockholm, May 1943

  Carl Borgenstierna sat in his study in his home on Själagårdsgatan, flipping through the documents for the next day’s proceedings at the Stockholm District Court. The matter was of particular importance to Carl’s friend the minister of justice. Minister of Justice Gyllenswärd had always been a mentor to him.

  Carl was alone in the house; the rest of the family was vacationing with friends on Gotland. The doorbell for the shop at street level rang, but the shop was closed for the day, and he had no desire to let in customers who just wanted to look at his father’s antiques. Their forefathers had laid the foundation of the family’s prosperity so his father could occupy himself with old objects and didn’t need to perform work that would provide a real income.

  The doorbell rang again; the visitor was persistent. Carl laid the document down, blew out the kerosene lamp on his desk, and walked down the stairs to the ground floor, where he opened the back door that separated the family’s private residence from the shop. The late-afternoon light didn’t illuminate much of the shop, and Carl walked cautiously to avoid knocking over any of the expensive old things spread around the premises on overfilled shelves, tables, and windowsills. His father had acquired the family’s collection of Russian antiques—water pitchers, cigarette cases, gold boxes, paintings, silver caviar servers, and gold-plated saucers decorated with painted scenes featuring soldiers from the czar’s army. The Russian antiques shared space in the room with his father’s true passion: nautical objects he had bought in shops and at trade fairs all over the world.

  Carl had been surrounded by these objects his entire childhood—nautical maps, steam whistles, duffel-bag handles, lanterns, binnacles, and barometers. He had grown up with the smell of polishing products and tar in his nostrils.

  Through the display window, Carl saw Wolfgang Wallentin peering into the shop.

  “Carl!” he shouted. “You have to come with me immediately!”

  Carl opened the door, and Wallentin staggered across the threshold.

  “What’s going on?”

  “She came to see me at the hospital. The woman from the opera.”

  In his mind Carl saw the pretty woman again. Her black headdress, her equally black gaze.

  “Did she come with her husband?”

  “No. She came with another man, a trusted friend. Father Stefan. She’s waiting for you in the Russian church. She needs your help, Carl.”

  Side by side, they ran down to Skeppsbron, where a Volvo taxi was waiting for them with its engine and meter running. Wallentin ran around the front of the car to avoid the odorless exhaust from the generator attached to the back, which resembled a sauna heater. Carl had heard about all the accidents with these cars, which had been returned to service due to the current gasoline shortage. It was common for fires to break out when their engines started, and doctors in Stockholm hospitals were treating a steady stream of patients with chronic producer-gas poisoning.

  “Why did she come to see you?” Carl asked after sitting in the backseat.

  “She said that she needed a doctor.”

  “Is she sick?”

  “I would not say she is sick in the medical sense.”

  “Pregnant?”

  Wallentin gave him the look he had seen so many times before, a look that expressed humanism, authority, and conceit. Wolfgang Wallentin—the young, successful head physician, the head of Sophiahemmet Hospital who was due to become the director of Stockholm’s modern new hospital, Södersjukhuset, the following year.

  “No, definitely not. I can assure you that she is not pregnant.”

  Carl nodded. Definitely not. Wolfgang always chose his words carefully. Why had he chosen to establish this fact with such emphasis?

  Siberia, Carl thought as he got out of the taxi. The Russian church stood at Birger Jarlsgatan 98, in an area so far from the center of Stockholm that it had been named after Russia’s most remote area.

  In the antechamber inside the front door, Father Stefan was waiting for him. He was wearing street clothes and took Carl’s hand when he stepped forward.

  “Thank you for coming. The young woman works for Madame Kollontai at the embassy. She has taken a great risk by contacting you, Mr. Borgenstierna. She is waiting in one of the front pews. I think it would be best if you spoke privately.”

  Carl looked at Wallentin, who nodded. What was this about?

  He walked slowly through the church. When the heavy wooden door closed after him, the noise of the street was shut out and he was filled with a calm, expectant feeling.

  The last rays of the afternoon sun shone through the blue-and-gold stained-glass ceiling. The light made the marbled yellow and pink walls shimmer. But the glass ceiling was cracked in several places; rainwater had gotten in and the floor was warped. Twenty years had passed since the Communist government had stopped the flow of money from Russia. Carl knew that the church movement in Stockholm survived on limited funding and on the charity still shown by some people in the city, people who did not see the war refugees from Saint Petersburg and the Baltic states as enemies.

  She sat in the middle of a pew at the front of the church with her gaze fixed on the iconostasis, an ornate painted screen. Carl slipped into the pew and sat next to the aisle, leaving a few meters between them. Dressed in a dark-gray wool coat and a light-brown felt hat, she looked like a different woman now. Her coat was unbuttoned, and under it he could see a white blouse of synthetic flannel and a broad light-gray pleated skirt. She was wearing smooth brown leather pumps with moderately high heels and stockings of light-brown synthetic silk. Like any other young woman in Stockholm. A woman who, in contrast to the version of her he had seen at the opera, wished to draw as little attention to herself as possible. When she turned toward Carl, he started. This everyday version of her surpassed the femme fatale he had seen at the opera. If anything, she was even more beautiful.

  Carl smiled at her.

  “My name is Carl Borgenstierna,” he said in Russian. “It is a pleasure to see you again.”

  She seemed to look right through him.

  “How can it be you speak Russian?” she asked.

  “My paternal grandfather was a Swedish consul in Saint Petersburg at the end of the last century. I grew up with his paintings on the walls at home, with Russian children’s stories and songs, and he taught me your language.”

  “For political purposes or for the sake of your career?”

  “Neither,” said Carl. “What is your name?”

  “Tatyana.”

  “Just Tatyana?”

  She turned to the iconostasis without answering.

  “What are you doing in Sweden?” Carl asked. “The man who was with you at the opera—is he your husband?”

  “We grew up in the same part of the Soviet Union. They found it practical.”

  Who
were “they”? Carl wondered. He would have to ask when there was another opportunity—if there was another opportunity.

  “I understand we don’t have a great deal of time,” said Carl. “You’ve contacted us because you want help. I have a certain amount of influence. What is it you need help with?”

  When Tatyana turned to him again, she looked at him in a different way. As if he had passed her first test.

  “My . . . husband and I are both of Russian extraction but come from the famine-ravaged Ukraine. Owing to our particular talents, we were saved and brought to Moscow. I had stood in line in a gymnasium together with hundreds of girls my age. When I reached the row of men and women who were to evaluate us, I was asked to perform in various ways: to bend this way and that, to memorize incomprehensible things, and to imitate the sounds of various languages, including yours. I was chosen and led to a little room. When I saw him, I realized that it had all been a charade, that everything had been scripted in advance so that I would feel chosen.”

  “What was it that made you feel that way?”

  “He did. He was the musical genius of Bayrak. Already as a young man he was known for his unique talents. Talents they felt would serve the great cause better if they were used for something other than mastering classical pieces on the piano.”

  “What is he doing now, then?”

  “He is without human qualities. A machine.”

  Carl sat in silence, tried to absorb what she had said.

  Then he said, “And what was your talent?”

  Tatyana met Carl’s gaze.

  “Acting,” she said.

  “And who do you believe arranged your meeting?”

  “The same man who married us. He is a monster. You have no idea of the cruelty he inflicts on his own people. Cruelty that will not remain within the borders of the Soviet Union. That will be spread by his worldwide red revolution.”

  Carl had no words.

  “I was born Tatyana Sedova. The man I am married to has come to your country to spy on you, and it is my duty to do the same. This is the purpose for which I was trained and prepared in Moscow. I am a Soviet spy against my will.”