Ten Swedes Must Die

by Martin Österdahl

  “Since the Wall came down, we’ve been trying to introduce our social system in Russia. The West won the Cold War. The peace agreement was signed by a Russian president who was drunk and broke and was trying to prevent the empire from disintegrating into a thousand pieces.”

  “Did we give him too raw a deal?”

  “Good question. The questions Russia is asking itself today are the same questions China and Africa and other areas of the world are all asking: Is the West willing to accept that we are different? That we have a different culture, a completely different history? If we don’t accept the conditions set forth by the West and all of its institutions—the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union, NATO—is the West still going to want to live in peace with us, or not?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think what I and the others at Vektor are doing is meaningful.”

  “Because you’re working to protect peace?”

  Max nodded. “Nothing is worse than war.”

  Sofia looked past Max, out into the lobby. She lowered her voice.

  “I can’t let go of the feeling that…as soon as I relax a little bit, as I did when we were joking around over there at the reception desk, or as I do when I come back to my apartment for the night, it’s like I hear the ticking of a clock in my head. My boss thinks the killer is starting a chess clock after every victim. That if we don’t make the next move, he will, and then the damned ticking will start up again.”

  “Is there anything at home that can help you put the job aside?”

  “There was, once, but there isn’t anymore. I wasn’t very good at that. And to be honest—it only makes things worse when you’re dealing with something like this.”

  Max nodded.

  “I have my dad,” said Sofia. “We share a special love of old American music, mostly film music. We find old recordings and share them with each other.”

  She smiled crookedly.

  “He’s an old musician, then?”

  “No, not at all. He was an industrial arts teacher. The music was Mama’s.”

  “Was Mama’s?” said Max.

  Sofia took a deep breath.

  “She’s no longer alive. She did interdisciplinary research. On music and learning. Music as the medicine of the future. Published her thoughts in the journal Forskning & Framsteg, among others.”

  Sofia smiled at the memory.

  “They were incredibly different. She was a damned hippie, but we loved her.”

  “What happened?” asked Max.

  Sofia took a sip of her ice water. The ice rattled when she set the glass back down on the table.

  “She ran into a gang of skinheads one evening when I was fifteen years old. They didn’t intend to kill her; they just wanted to harass her a little. But they were drunk, and things got out of hand. She fell in the water and was sucked into a drainage hole under the Slussen locks. Her body was never found.”

  “For God’s sake,” said Max. “I’m terribly sorry—maybe I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, you don’t need to apologize. Now you know what all my colleagues know. Why I do what I do. Why I put myself through this shit every day. I read everything there was to read about right-wing extremism, as though I were going to find a logical explanation of what had happened to Mama. I worked my ass off at the police academy, worked with the National Task Force for a while, got a good job in central Stockholm, at the National Bureau of Investigation. Few people in Sweden know more about neo-Nazis than I do. But do you think I’ve gotten any closer to solving the mystery of what happened to Mama? Or that I’ve somehow managed to come to terms with her fate?”

  Max shook his head. A lot of what she’d told him reminded him of himself and his own life.

  “Why were they harassing your mother?” he asked.

  “Because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because she happened to have been born in Mexico and had skin that was a little darker than theirs. But probably mostly because they drank a few bottles of cheap aquavit down on the floating pier right before Mama walked past them.”

  Sofia was another victim of meaningless violence driven by some imbecilic ideology.

  “She loved American film music,” said Sofia. “And she loved to make the world’s best eggs for breakfast. That’s how I remember her.”

  Max leaned forward.

  “We’re going to catch this bastard,” he said. “And switch off that chess clock in your head.”

  54

  Wass.

  He lay beneath Kandinsky on a bed of fir branches, surrounded by fern fronds. His hands and feet were tightly bound. The duct tape that had been wound all the way around his head several times covered his mouth but not his eyes. Kandinsky didn’t want him to be able to budge or make the slightest sound. But he wanted him to be able to see.

  He’d had to put up with the man’s muted, pathetic sounds of complaint while he had carved the suns onto his forehead and the number onto his chest. His flopping, wiggling lateral movements had made it more difficult for Kandinsky to create the perfect circles and the wavy lines representing sunbeams. He’d had to make a great effort to ensure that what he’d carved would still be properly apparent after what was awaiting the man. He wanted to be sure the markings would be visible in the bone after the skin and flesh had been removed from the body. He had covered the ground with birch branches and fern fronds.

  This is how we eliminate excess. Yours as well as our own.

  Soon the eyes of the world would be looking exactly where he wanted them to. The truth he was telling the world was a story it didn’t want to hear. Told in a language everyone spoke. The only language that had ever called him by his true name. The language of violence.

  When the man on the bed of fir branches saw Kandinsky raise the jerrican to the ceiling, he began to shake, violently. Twisted his body, tried in vain to free his hands. At that moment, nothing existed but fear. Fear of death, the desperate human survival instinct. There was nothing holy in a human being, nothing that brought one’s thoughts to those people who were nearest and dearest, to the human collective, to the fatherland. The only thoughts in that moment were of escaping death. The man was an animal caught in a hunter’s trap.

  Kandinsky ignored Wass’s last pleading look and tossed a match that landed on his chest. With the explosive sound of the igniting gasoline and the man’s scream in his ears, he stepped over the threshold and left the house.

  Outside, he poured the last of the gasoline on the bicycle wheel he had covered in dead branches to transform it into a wreath and attached to the gatepost. He set the wreath afire and spun the wheel so that the fire spun around and around in constant motion against the backdrop of the flames shooting from the cabin windows.

  Before he got in the car, he took a last look at his work. The fire from the spinning wheel on the gatepost lit up the family’s nameplate next to the mailbox.

  For Kandinsky, the burning body in there was not a human being, a son or a father. He was only a step on the way. A number.

  Örebro, December 1945

  A saint in white clothes approached his bed. She wore a wreath of lit candles on her head and was followed by a group of girls in white dresses.

  He weighed forty-five kilograms and could not walk. He, Ozols, who was as broad shouldered as Hercules and had never lost a fight in the bars of Tallinn’s harbor quarter.

  If he had not recognized Anna standing above him, he would have thought he was dead and what was transpiring before him was a play in the afterlife.

  Lucia. You’re a miracle.

  They had been together as a man and a woman. Despite his weakness, it had been desperate, intoxicating, animal. The new spark of life Anna had given him had convinced him to end his hunger strike after twenty days. Enough of his brothers had died. He needed to go on living to continue their fight. The fire Anna had lit in him would carry him onward no matter what happened.

  Reluctantly, he had enco
uraged his brothers to give the Swedes one last chance. But the meeting with the committee of physicians had proven to be pointless, just as he had feared. Before going to see the doctors, the internees had been nourished carefully, first with liquids and then, when they were stronger, with candy and good food. Then, there would be no further twists in their tale. They were hogs being fattened for the slaughter.

  Ozols had changed in these last twenty days, and not just physically. Something inside him had gone away and been replaced with a new calling, with his promise to the brothers who had lost their lives.

  I will fight until I draw my last breath, for Aistia, the unification of the Baltics. To achieve my goal, I must build up my strength again.

  Their extradition was to happen sometime in January. The Beloostrov was docked at Trelleborg, waiting for them. Recently the Swedes had shown themselves to be even more concerned about the internees’ health than they had been before. They seemed to be worried about the possibility that more of them would die. To prevent losing any of the sick men, they had put up a new barbed-wire fence around the hospital. No doubt they’d promised Stalin a certain number of souls.

  Given how long the Swedes had known about the extradition, they must have made their plans with great care. Ozols wondered how the last act was going to play out. Their last battle on Swedish territory. In the case of the Germans, the Swedes had proceeded brutally and hatefully, had extradited men with broken arms and legs, with slashed veins. When they hadn’t had enough police officers, the fire department had deployed its hoses.

  What are they going to do to us? The Russians are developing nuclear weapons. The Swedes fear for their lives. No human beings are as cruel and dangerous as those who are afraid.

  All of his brothers had prepared. Broken drinking glasses and hidden shards of glass where no one could find them.

  During the long hours that had passed while he’d floated in and out of consciousness, Ozols had imagined where he would go if Vanyka would just permit him a single day of freedom in Riga before he was transported onward, toward the land of the polar bears.

  The Jesuit children’s home in Riga. He saw the words inscribed above the doorway.

  “My heart became hot within me. While I dreamed the fire burned.”

  Ozols felt that he was suffocating when he saw the words before him.

  The scene replayed itself in his mind again and again. And he had no hope that it would ever stop torturing him.

  He had thought a great deal of her, Rebeka. Given what their countrymen were going through in the camps here in Sweden, her acts seemed the most despicable of all. No betrayal was greater than hers. To abandon one’s own flesh and blood. To turn her back on him in Skeppsmyra and send him to a slow and painful death. To betray her country.

  She would have to pay for those acts with her life.

  Revenge was the only consolation there was.

  When Ozols wiped the tears from Anna’s cheeks after he’d told her his story, he saw that the hate that had grown in him had also taken root in her.

  Together they had composed a document to send to the Swedish government. Ozols had dictated it, and Anna had translated it and written it down in Swedish. It began with the words I accuse Sweden.

  It was not a last cry for help. It was a warning of what would one day come.

  THURSDAY,

  AUGUST 17

  55

  When Denis opened the door to his office at the Russian embassy, he felt a prickling sensation at the back of his neck. He recognized the feeling of being hunted; he’d experienced it a few times in the last couple of days.

  Papanov was sitting in Denis’s chair, behind his desk.

  “How was the dinner last night?” he asked.

  The centralized Russian government had ears and eyes everywhere. Denis was the third man from the top at Russia’s embassy in Stockholm and did not belong to the trusted elite who were spared this kind of vigilant attention. If he protested, Papanov would no doubt claim that Denis and everyone else in Stockholm needed extra protection and that it was all about his own safety. And who could say whether it was a matter of protection or distrust? Denis had never learned to tell the difference.

  “Excellent. Thanks for asking,” he replied. “I recommend Gondolen’s homemade pickled herring and their Wallenberger.”

  Papanov smiled a little.

  Denis had specified the wrong appetizer in order to find out whether whoever had spied on him had actually come into the dining room or had just followed him on his way to the restaurant. He had thought this might establish the important distinction between consideration and suspicion. But as usual, Papanov displayed no reaction.

  “Was she happy to hear that we’ve received help from the English and the Norwegians?” asked Papanov.

  During the dinner with Pashie, Denis hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Papanov’s unusual instructions. They had engendered conflicting feelings in him. On the one hand, he was firmly committed to serving his country. On the other hand, he had feelings for Pashie that wouldn’t go away. Her hand had felt soft in his. He didn’t know where he wanted those feelings to lead, but he didn’t want her to be harmed, no matter what happened.

  “I would say so, yes,” said Denis. “She’s a woman with her heart in the right place.”

  Papanov raised his eyebrows. Shifted in his chair. “Do you know what they say about women’s hearts in Kamchatka?”

  Denis looked with surprise at the man sitting in his chair. How old was he, actually? He seemed to have lived more than one life, seen more than this world. Denis could not imagine what his Russian brothers in the most remote area of the country had to say about women’s hearts, so he just shook his head.

  “That when they get cold, they take them out and put them in heating cabinets.”

  Denis didn’t understand. It was like a different language.

  “Pashie told me they were going to collect money to benefit the widows,” he said.

  Papanov grimaced a little. What else?

  “She also said that at Vektor they were discussing the bombing at Centrs and were going to investigate it further.”

  Finally a reaction. Papanov narrowed his eyes.

  “Good,” he said. “That’s good. Then maybe they can be of use to us.”

  Papanov stood up and walked over to Denis. Laid a hand on his shoulder. Denis felt himself sink a few centimeters from the weight of his hand. The eagle on Papanov’s signet ring seemed to be staring at him as though it had caught sight of prey.

  “Keep her close to you, Denis Zynoviev. And monitor what Vektor is doing. I’ll be in touch with you again soon.”

  56

  “Do you still always have a packed suitcase somewhere in the house?” asked Anastasia.

  Charlie Knutsson turned his head toward her side of the bed. Her sudden appearance last night had been like a scene from a dream. The image of her suddenly there, in the red glow of the taxi’s taillights as its wheels spun in the gravel to leave, was one he would always remember. She had stood there at his door, self-confident as always. As if it had been self-evident that one day she would return.

  Time heals no wounds, she was in the habit of saying. Only people’s actions could do the healing. And it was actions of that kind that defined a person’s character.

  Her arrival was a complete about-face after their previous meeting. After that dinner, he would never have imagined that she would once again want to share his bed. That at their age the act of love could be as strong, as vertiginous, and as animal as back then, when they were young. Whether she wanted to heal wounds by suddenly showing up like this, he didn’t know. But the night had certainly had a healing effect on him.

  The orange light of the morning fell on her through the thin white curtains. Of course she had changed, but the magical cells and processes that produce beauty in a woman had not stopped working for Anastasia Friedenberga—that was clear. Her colors were not quite the same, her voice was pitch
ed at a different tone, her skin had a different tension; but the smoothness, the lines, and the scent of her were lovelier than in his memories.

  “Perhaps I’m done traveling?” he said. “Can’t we stay in the here and now? You and I?”

  She moved closer to him, laid a hand on his chest.

  “So this pleases you? I did say I needed to know what birthday this was so I could determine the caliber of your present.”

  “Don’t talk about my birthday.”

  “Turning seventy isn’t as bad as you think. Ask me, I know.”

  “No one is going to believe you if you say you’ve turned seventy.”

  She laid a finger on his lower lip and tapped it.

  “Hasn’t it always been like that? That certain people haven’t believed me?”

  Charlie shook his head. There had been many times when he wasn’t strong enough to believe her. Maybe his lack of credulity had been responsible for ending their relationship so early and so badly?

  “What about you?” he asked. “Are you going back to the Baltics when you get old? Or are you going to stay here?”

  Anastasia’s fingers played with the hair on his chest. He felt the sharp nails that had torn at his back only a few hours previously.

  “I don’t know whether any of those countries I loved are still there. It’s been such a long time since I’ve been there.”

  Charlie smiled.

  “You haven’t laid down your weapons, Tasenka. You can’t fool me that easily.”

  The hand on his chest froze. Her face closed.

  “I had forgotten that you used to call me that. Not many have done so in my life.”

  “You told me about it, that it was what you were called when you were a child,” said Charlie. “By your friend. Did you ever get in contact with her again?”

  She sat up in the bed. Her gaze wandered out the window, down toward the garden.

  “We never met again,” she said.