A Darker Shade of Sweden

by John-Henri Holmberg (Editor)

  “Where do you want to get with all this? Nobody can stop death.”

  “No, but it can be postponed. We want you to let Professor Zägel’s brain borrow your head in order for him to finish his work. We want you to be his new heart and body.”

  I just stared stupidly at him. There was a long pause before I managed to reply.

  “You’re insane,” I whispered hoarsely.

  “To Professor Zägel, it’s a matter of life or death.”

  “What about me, then? What about my life? I’ll never agree to it!”

  “You have to. Professor Zägel has no more than a week left to live.”

  “The answer is no. To me, Zägel is welcome to die this instant, if that’s what he wants. My life is more important to me than his. How could you even suggest something like this?”

  “You have no choice in the matter. Professor Zägel is too important.”

  “You can’t force me!” I stood up and grabbed Wester’s jacket.

  “Pull yourself together, for God’s sake!”

  “Pull myself together?” I cried back at him. “Do you really expect me to commit suicide just to save Zägel’s life?”

  “Professor Zägel’s knowledge is of paramount importance to all of humanity.”

  “I won’t do it. Is that why you’ve been testing me these last weeks? What made you pick me instead of anyone else?”

  “That’s self-evident. You are as fit as anyone on earth. Your physique is phenomenal. Professor Zägel himself picked you out three months ago . . .”

  “So he’s picked me. He’s chosen his own salvation. I’m supposed to save Zägel’s life by means of his own discovery. But you’ll never make me do it.”

  “You have no choice. The president himself has approved the plan.”

  I sat silent for a few seconds, then shot up and tore the door open, attempting to get out of the university. But I didn’t manage more than five steps before the guards posted outside my door had caught me. I yelled and cursed, kicked them to make them release me. One of them twisted my arm hard behind my back, and the pain made me scream.

  “Don’t hurt him!” I heard Wester call out.

  So I did have one small advantage. They couldn’t hurt me, but I had no scruples as far as they were concerned. When all is said and done, I am one of the world’s foremost athletes. I aimed a kick at the stomach of one of the guards, and hit home perfectly. He doubled up, and before the other one had a chance to stop me I kicked him again. The second guard held me in a hard grip around my body, locking my arms to my sides, but I slammed him hard against the wall. I heard him moan when the back of his head struck the marble, but I was unable to pity him. I was fighting for my life. He refused to let go, but when I threw myself down, his body flew forward, above my head. Now my hands were free, and with all my strength I drove my fist against his temple.

  Jumping across the first guard, who had started to rise, I ran towards the exit. Wester tried to catch hold of me after a couple of steps, wanting to stop me, but I pushed him violently aside. “Bastard,” I cried, and ran out the revolving door.

  I ran along the hallway and down the stairs until I reached the ground floor, where I paused for a second or two while trying to remember if I should go left or right to get out of the building. I decided on left and was halfway down the hall when I heard the loudspeakers warn that I was escaping. They urged everyone to try to stop me, but warned people to be careful not to harm me. Suddenly I was back in the rotunda and saw the huge glass doors leading to freedom.

  I began running but was immediately seen by the receptionist at the information desk. She stood up, yelling at me to stop, but of course I ignored her. She screamed for the uniformed guard who had helped me find my way on that first day to stop me, and I saw him closing in on me at an angle. He was closer to the doors than I was, but I was faster. I knew that if I could only make it out the doors, I could outrun anyone who tried to catch me.

  Perhaps being a champion runner wasn’t such a bad thing after all. The guard almost reached me, but missed by a few inches.

  I threw myself out the doors and began running across the lawn. I was dressed only in my pajamas and was barefoot, so I had to choose the lawn. I made it out of the campus block. I ran across the street and saw a man just getting into his car. He was putting his key into the ignition lock when I threw the door open and tore him out on the pavement.

  “Sorry, buddy, but this is life or death,” I told him.

  The car didn’t start on the first turn of the key, but on the second try it began spinning. The guards were sixty or seventy feet away when I started accelerating and I assumed that they noted the plate number. I drove for six blocks, then turned towards the main road. I had to stop for a red light, and while I waited for traffic to pass by I realized that I was shaking from fear. I felt empty inside, unable to realize how I—I, of all people—had ended up in this nightmare.

  “Fuck you, Mr. President,” I muttered. “And to think I voted for you. Next time I’ll vote for the Democrats . . . if there is a next time.”

  When I woke up, Wester was leaning down over me. The shock from the injection they’d given me was slowly abating, and I was able to start thinking again. I tried to rise, but found that leather straps tied me to the bed, so I let my body relax.

  “What . . . how?” I asked.

  “The police caught you. You shouldn’t have tried to run.”

  “No, of course not. I suppose I should just urge you to operate as soon as possible?”

  “The operation will be tonight. We don’t dare let Professor Zägel fight his body any longer. He might die at any moment.”

  “Let’s hope. Is there really no way you could pick someone else?”

  “No. It’s too late, and regardless of that you are the one we need. Your excellent physique makes your chances to survive the operation better than anyone had during any of Professor Zägel’s previous procedures. And besides, this time I’ll be operating, and it will be my first time. I want the best chance possible to succeed, particularly given the importance of this operation.”

  “My life is important to me. I have a wife and two children. I’m responsible for them and have to take care of them!”

  “Don’t worry about your family. The state will take care of them in the best way possible. They’ll want for nothing.”

  “But I don’t want to lose them. I don’t want to die!”

  “I’m sorry, but there really isn’t any alternative.”

  “But why try to stop the inevitable? Zägel will die anyway, sooner or later. Even at best, I won’t live for more than fifty or sixty years.”

  “Professor Zägel can put those fifty or sixty years to immense use. And please let me ease your mind. You won’t feel anything at all during the operation.”

  “And what will you do with my brain afterward?” I asked him ironically. “Donate it to medical research?”

  “No, of course not. We plan on freezing it. In a few years, perhaps when Professor Zägel has perfected his method, we’ll try to find a suitable body for it. Maybe you’ll even get your own body back, though I doubt the government will agree to that.”

  “I doubt it, too. Zägel will still be important. And what will you do when my body wears down? Find him another?”

  “Perhaps. That will depend on how worn-out his brain is becoming.”

  “Don’t you have any feelings at all?” I didn’t even try to hide the loathing I felt for him.

  “You have to understand why we’re doing this. Look at it from our perspective. We do what we truly believe is best for the state. In addition to his medical work, Professor Zägel is also engaged in designing robots to cancel the Russian defense shields.”

  I spat at him, but Wester didn’t even react.

  “I’ll leave you now. Next time we meet will be in the operating room. Your wife has been permitted to see you for two hours. You will be entirely undisturbed during that time, and how you spend it conce
rns nobody else.”

  Wester opened the door. Two guards entered the room. They undid my restraints and left before I had time even to rise. After a few minutes the door opened again, and Judith walked in. She had tears in her eyes and threw herself into my arms.

  “Michael,” she gasped. “Why, Michael? Why you?”

  “They just picked me. Do you know what will happen?”

  “They’ve told me. But they can’t do it, Michael, tell me they can’t do it!”

  I sighed. “I’m afraid they can. I did my best to get out of here, but I only got a few blocks away before the cops picked me up.”

  “But the police are supposed to protect people’s lives.”

  “They do exactly as the government tells them. And in this case, Zägel’s life is more important than that of an athlete. Judith, promise me to take care of Junior and Tina. Make sure they get the best of everything.”

  “Oh, Michael, can’t you stop it somehow?”

  “How?”

  She made a helpless gesture. I held her close and kissed her. For the first time I realized how unbelievably lucky I really had been to find a wife like Judith.

  “Where are the kids?” I asked her.

  “They weren’t allowed to come. They’re too young to understand this kind of thing, they told me.”

  “Too young . . .” I felt bitter.

  “I’ll take care of them.”

  I pulled her down on the bed.

  “Michael . . . Wester, that man out there, he says they might be able to freeze your brain and wake it again later.”

  “But my body will be ten years older, or even much more than that. At the very least I’ll have lost years of my life. And besides, I don’t believe they’ll give me my body back even when Zägel has finished his work. He would still have maybe fifty years left to live in it, and I suspect the government won’t feel like wasting those years on me.”

  I kissed her again, softly at first, then hard and demanding.

  “We have two hours. Would you? One last time?”

  I began undressing her. We touched and teased each other, fondled and urged each other on. Finally we tumbled down on the bed and made love more tenderly and intensely than ever before. It was my last time, and I had never before felt a greater passion, never before realized how much I truly loved living. My last time. I could hardly assume that Judith would live in celibacy for the rest of her life because I was no longer there. Perhaps she would marry again. In that case, who? I couldn’t bear thinking about that.

  We melted together.

  Afterwards we lay talking. Judith smoked one of her cigarettes. I caressed her thoughtfully. Strangely enough, neither of us felt any despair or fear despite what would happen. We were both very calm and spoke mostly of things in the same way we used to do when I was going off to some training camp and would be gone for a couple of weeks. We talked just as if I would be back after a while.

  They let us stay together for more than two hours, but after three, one of the guards knocked on my door, stuck his head in and told us to get ready to say goodbye. We dressed, or at least she did, and we said our goodbyes. Then we sat holding each other until they came back in through the door.

  They closed the door behind Judith, and one of the men stayed inside trying to talk to me. I didn’t want to. I just lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, remembering Judith’s lips.

  At half past four the other guard came back and told me to make myself ready. I had half an hour. He wondered if I would like to talk to a priest, but I told him no. Then a nurse came and shaved my head.

  I was hungry, but they wouldn’t allow me to eat. At five sharp a nurse rolled in a hospital bed and asked me to lie down on it so she could roll me off to surgery.

  “The hell I will,” I told her. “I’ve got legs to walk on, and if this is my last trip, at least I’ll walk it myself.”

  None of them objected. I stood, put my shorts on and followed the nurse. The guards walked behind me. When we stepped into the hallway, I thought of trying to escape again, but I knew it would be pointless. They would have caught me in a few minutes. So I stepped into the lift instead. Another hallway, more swinging doors. Then I stood in the operating room. There were half a dozen people, all of them busy preparing for the operation.

  Mark Wester came up to me. He nodded and asked me to lie down. There were two operating tables in the room. A man already lay on one of them. I assumed him to be Zägel, and for a second or two I was filled with the thought of rushing up to him, crushing his head, beating his brain to a pulp. Wester broke the spell by grabbing hold of my arm and walking me to my table. I lay down and someone covered my body with a mauve sheet.

  “Let me thank you for all your assistance and cooperation,” Wester said. “Thank you.”

  I felt the sting of a needle in my arm.

  The last thing I remember was hating him. Hating him. Hating . . .

  Born in the small town of Skelleftehamn in 1954, Stieg Larsson grew up at his maternal grandparents’ house in a village of less than fifty inhabitants, only rejoining his parents at the age of nine after the death of his grandfather. He moved out to live on his own at sixteen and from eighteen until his death was in a relationship with fellow political activist and science fiction fan, and later architect, Eva Gabrielsson. They were both active in science fiction fandom throughout the 1970s. After moving to Stockholm in 1977, Larsson worked as a graphic artist with a news agency during the 1980s and 1990s, but simultaneously became known in Sweden as a leading opponent of racist and totalitarian views, on which he published several books in addition to being the Scandinavian correspondent for the British antifascist Searchlight magazine. In 1995, he was involved in founding the similar Swedish magazine Expo, of which he was the editor from 1999 until his death. Hoping since his teens to break through as a fiction writer, Larsson in 2002 began writing a series of crime novels taking their basic theme from his feminist and antitotalitarian convictions. He died of a sudden heart attack in November 2004. By that time, he had finished and sold the three first novels featuring journalist Mikael Blomkvist and expert hacker Lisbeth Salander, and was working on further books in the series. The three finished novels, called The Millennium Trilogy, were published in Sweden in 2005 to 2007 and made publishing history. They have appeared in more than fifty countries, selling a total of seventy-five million copies to date, making them the best-selling adult novels in the world during the first decade of the twenty-first century; they have also been made into both Swedish and American feature movies. The first novel in the series, Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women, but in English published as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) was awarded the Glass Key as the year’s best crime novel in any Nordic country by the Nordic Crime Fiction Society; the second, Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire), received the best novel of the year award from the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy; the third, Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest), again received the Glass Key. The novels have also received numerous awards in other countries.

  AN UNLIKELY MEETING

  HENNING MANKELL AND HÅKAN NESSER

  Henning Mankell and Håkan Nesser are two of the giants of modern Swedish crime fiction, both also known and highly respected for their nongenre work.

  Henning Mankell published his first crime novel (and his eleventh book) in 1991. It introduced his recurring protagonist, Detective Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad police. He has since returned in ten further novels and one story collection, which have made the small town of Ystad—situated on the south coast of Sweden, where it was founded as a fishing village in the late twelve century and with just over 18,000 inhabitants—internationally famous. In one of the novels, Before the Frost (originally published in 2002), the main protagonist is Wallander’s daughter, Linda, newly graduated from the police academy.

  Håkan Nesser’s first crime novel was Det grovmaskiga nätet (The Mind’s Eye), which appeared in Swedish
in 1993. It introduced Detective Chief Inspector Van Veeteren in the fictitious town of Maardam, placed in an also fictitious, unnamed country in Northern Europe and with similarities to the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Poland. Van Veeteren is in his early sixties at the start of the series; in the first five novels he is on active duty, but in the later ones he has retired from the police and instead works as an antiquarian bookseller but still assists in police investigations. He is a sullen, cynical man and an avid chess player.

  After ten Van Veeteren novels, Håkan Nesser changed venue and has written six novels featuring a Swedish police Inspector of Italian descent, Gunnar Barbarotti, and several stand-alone novels. Like Henning Mankell, he is widely translated. Together, the two authors have received one Best First Novel Award and no less than five Best Novel of the Year Awards from the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy.

  “An Unlikely Meeting” is their only collaboration, a fascinating metafiction of a strange night in the lives of their two most famous protagonists. Readers should also know that Håkan Nesser is tall, thin, with dark, thinning hair, while Henning Mankell is short, heavily built, with fairly long, white-gray hair.

  SUDDENLY WALLANDER REALIZED THAT HE NO LONGER KNEW WHERE HE was. Why couldn’t she have come to Ystad instead? On the freeway, somewhere north of Kassel, he had doubted if it was even possible to drive on any longer. The snow had come down very heavy. Already then he had known that he would be late for his meeting with his daughter. Why did Linda have to suggest that they should spend Christmas together somewhere in the middle of Europe?

  He turned on the roof light in the car and found his map. In the beam lights the road stretched empty. Where had he made a wrong turn? Around him was darkness. He had a sudden premonition of being forced to spend Christmas night in his car. He would drive blindly along these unknown continental roads and he would never find Linda.

  He searched the map. Was he even anywhere at all? Or had he crossed some invisible border to a country that didn’t even exist? He put away his map and drove on. The snow had suddenly stopped falling.