The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” Wallander said. “Who would take a risk like that?”

  “I’m lost,” Martinsson said.

  “Maybe Major Liepa will have the answer,” Wallander said. “Bring him here. Then we’ll have a thorough search. And tell somebody to get ahold of the patrol officer. Who was it?”

  “I think it was Peters. He’s probably at home now, in bed. If it snows tomorrow night, he’s going to have a hard shift.”

  “We’ll have to wake him,” Wallander said. “We have no alternative.”

  When Martinsson left, Wallander inspected the door. It was a thick steel door with a double lock, but the burglars had gotten in without doing any visible damage to the door itself. Obviously the lock had been picked. These people knew what they were doing, Wallander thought. They knew how to pick a lock at any rate. He took another look at the overturned trestles. He’d inspected the life raft himself, and had been absolutely certain he hadn’t missed anything. Martinsson and Österdahl had also examined the raft, and so had Rönnlund and Lovén.

  What didn’t we notice? There has to be something, he thought.

  Martinsson reappeared with the major, cigarette in hand. Wallander switched on all the lights, and Martinsson explained to the major what had happened. Wallander was watching him. As he’d expected, Liepa showed no surprise. He only nodded slowly, then turned to Wallander.

  “You had examined the life raft,” he said. “A retired captain had specified that it had been made in Yugoslavia, I think. That’s no doubt correct—there are many Yugoslavian life rafts on Latvian vessels, including police boats. But you had examined the raft, I believe?”

  “Yes,” Wallander answered. And then he realized the fatal error he’d made. Nobody had let the air out of the rubber boat, nobody had looked inside it. It had not occurred to him to do so. Major Liepa seemed to have understood already, and Wallander felt embarrassed. How could he have failed to open the raft up? He would have thought of it sooner or later, of course, but he ought to have done it immediately. It would be a waste of time to explain to Major Liepa what he’d already worked out for himself.

  “What could have been inside?” he asked.

  Major Liepa shrugged.

  “Drugs, I suppose,” he said.

  Wallander thought for a moment.

  “That doesn’t follow. Two corpses are dumped in a life raft filled with drugs? Then left to drift wherever the wind takes it?”

  “That’s right,” said Major Liepa. “Perhaps a mistake had been made. The person who collected the life raft was given the task of putting it right.”

  They made a minute inspection of the whole basement. Wallander hurried up to reception and asked Ebba to devise a plausible emergency that had prevented him from presenting his report to Anette Brolin. The news that the police station had been burgled spread like wildfire, and Björk came storming down the stairs.

  “If this gets out,” he said, “we’ll be the laughing stock of the whole country.”

  “This won’t be leaked,” Wallander said. “It’s too painful.”

  Wallander told Björk what he guessed had happened, realizing that Björk would have serious reservations as to whether he was competent to run a serious crime investigation. It had been an inexcusable lapse.

  Have I grown complacent? he wondered. Am I even up to being a security officer at the Trelleborg Rubber Company? Maybe the best thing would be for me to go back on the beat again in Malmö?

  They found not a single clue. No fingerprints, no footprints on the dusty floor. The gravel outside the forced door had been churned up by police cars, and there was nothing to indicate that any of the tire tracks weren’t from the police’s own cars. Eventually they agreed that there was nothing more they could do, and they went back to the conference room. Peters had turned up, sullen and angry at having been called in. All he could contribute was the exact time that he had discovered the break-in. Wallander had also checked with the night duty staff, but nobody had seen or heard anything. Nothing. Nothing at all. Wallander suddenly felt very tired. He had a headache from Major Liepa’s cigarettes. What should I do now? he wondered. What would Rydberg have done?

  Two days later the missing life raft was still a mystery. Major Liepa had advised that trying to track it down would waste resources. Wallander had to agree, however reluctantly, but he couldn’t shake off the sense of having made an unforgivable mistake. He was despondent, and woke every morning with a headache.

  Skåne was in the grip of a fierce snowstorm. The police were warning people via the radio to stay at home and venture out onto the roads only if it was absolutely essential. Wallander’s father was snowed in, but when he phoned, his father told him he hadn’t even noticed that the road was deep in snow drifts. The chaos caused by the blizzard meant that more or less no progress was made with the case. Major Liepa had shut himself in Svedberg’s office and was studying the ballistics report. Wallander had a long meeting with Anette Brolin. Every time he met her he was stung by the memory of the crush he had on her the year before, but the memory seemed unreal, as if he’d imagined it all. Brolin contacted the director of public prosecutions, and the legal section of the foreign ministry, to get approval to close the case in Sweden and hand it over to the police in Riga. Major Liepa had also arranged for his headquarters to make a formal request to the foreign ministry.

  On an evening when the blizzard was at its height, Wallander invited Major Liepa to his apartment. He’d bought a bottle of whisky, which they emptied during the course of the evening. Wallander started feeling drunk after a couple of glasses, but Major Liepa appeared completely unaffected. Wallander had started addressing him simply as “major,” and he didn’t seem to object. It wasn’t easy to hold a conversation with the Latvian police officer. Wallander couldn’t decide whether this was due to shyness, if his poor English embarrassed him, or if he might have a touch of aristocratic reserve. Wallander told him about his family, chiefly Linda and the college she was at in Stockholm. For his part, Major Liepa said simply that he was married to a woman named Baiba, but that they had no children. As the evening wore on, they sat for long intervals holding their glasses, saying nothing.

  “Sweden and Latvia,” Wallander said, “are there any similarities? Or is everything different? I try to picture Latvia, but I just can’t. And yet we’re neighbors.”

  The moment he’d uttered the question, Wallander realized it was pointless. Sweden was not a country governed as a colony by a foreign power. There were no barricades in the streets of Sweden. Innocent people were not shot or run over by military vehicles. Surely everything was different?

  The major’s reply was surprising.

  “I’m a religious man,” he said. “I don’t believe in a particular God, but even so one can have a faith, something beyond the limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element of built-in faith, although it claims to be a science and not merely an ideology. This is my first visit to the West: until now I have only been able to go to the Soviet Union or Poland or the Baltic states. In your country I see an abundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. But there’s a difference between our countries that is also a similarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has different faces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we don’t have the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not need to fight for your survival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension, and I would not want to exchange that for your abundance.”

  Wallander knew the major had prepared this speech in advance: he hadn’t paused to search for words. But what exactly had he said? Swedish poverty? Wallander felt he must protest.

  “You’re wrong, major,” he said. “There’s a struggle going on in this country too. A lot of people here are excluded—was that the right word?—from the abundance you describe. Nobody starves to death, it is true, but you are wrong if you think we don’t have to fight.”

  “One can only fight f
or survival,” the major said. “I include the fight for freedom and independence. Whatever a person does beyond that is something they choose to do, not something they have to do.”

  Silence followed. Wallander would have liked to ask so many questions, not least about recent events in Riga, but he didn’t want to reveal his ignorance. Instead, he got up and put on a Maria Callas record.

  “Turandot,” the major said. “Very beautiful.”

  The snow and wind raged outside as Wallander watched the major striding away towards his hotel soon after midnight. He was hunched into the wind, wearing his cumbersome overcoat.

  The snowstorm had blown itself out by the following morning, and blocked roads could be reopened.

  When Wallander woke up, he had a hangover, but he’d made a decision. While they were awaiting the decision from the director of public prosecutions, he would take Major Liepa with him to Brantevik to see the fishing boat he’d visited one night the week before.

  Just after 9 a.m. they were in Wallander’s car, heading east. The snow-covered landscape glittered in the bright sunshine: it was -3°C.

  The harbor was deserted. Several fishing boats were moored at the jetty furthest out, but Wallander couldn’t immediately tell which one he’d been on. They walked out along the jetty, Wallander counting 73 steps.

  The boat was called Byron. It was timber-built, painted white, and about 40 feet long. Wallander grasped the thick mooring rope and closed his eyes: did he recognize it? He couldn’t say. They clambered aboard. A dark red tarpaulin was lashed over the hold. As they approached the wheelhouse, which was secured by a large padlock, Wallander tripped over a coiled hawser and knew he was on the right boat. The major pulled loose a corner of the tarpaulin and shone a flashlight into the hold: it was empty.

  “No smell of fish,” Wallander said. “No sign of any fish scales, no nets. This boat is used for smuggling. But what are they smuggling? And where to?”

  “Everything,” said the major. “There has been an acute shortage of everything in the Baltic states up until now, and so smugglers can bring us anything at all.”

  “I’ll find out who owns the boat,” Wallander said. “Even if I’ve made a promise, I can still find out who owns it. Would you have made the promise I did, major?”

  “No,” Major Liepa replied. “I’d never have done that.”

  There wasn’t much more to see. When they got back to Ystad Wallander spent the afternoon trying to establish who owned the Byron. It wasn’t easy. It had changed owners numerous times in the last few years, and one of the many owners had been a trading company in Simrishamn with the imaginative name Wankers’ Fish. Next the boat had been sold to a fisherman by the name of Öhrström, who had sold it after only a few months. Wallander eventually managed to establish that a Sten Holmgren, who lived in Ystad, now owned the boat. Wallander was surprised to find that they actually lived on the same street, Mariagatan. He looked up Sten Holmgren in the phone book, but didn’t find him. There were no records of a company owned by Sten Holmgren at the county offices in Malmö. To be on the safe side Wallander also checked the county offices in Kristianstad and Karlskrona, but there was no trace of a Sten Holmgren there either.

  Wallander flung down his pencil and went for a cup of coffee. The phone started ringing as he returned to his office. It was Anette Brolin.

  “Guess what I have to tell you,” she said.

  “That you’re dissatisfied with one of our investigations again?”

  “Of course I am, but that’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Then I’ve no idea.”

  “The case is to be closed, and the whole matter will be transferred to Riga.”

  “Is that definite?”

  “The director of public prosecutions and the foreign ministry are in complete agreement. They both say the case should be abandoned. I’ve just heard. The formalities seem to have been sorted out in double time. Your major can go home now, and take the bodies with him.”

  “He’ll be glad about that,” Wallander said. “Going home, that is.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “None at all.”

  “Ask him to come and see me. I’ve told Björk. Is Liepa around?”

  “He’s in Svedberg’s office, smoking his head off. I’ve never met a heavier smoker.”

  Early the next day Major Liepa caught a flight to Stockholm with a connection to Riga. The two zinc-lined coffins went to Stockholm in a hearse, and onwards by air cargo.

  Wallander and Major Liepa said their goodbyes at the check-in at Sturup. Wallander had bought an illustrated book on Skåne as a farewell present—it was the best he could think of.

  “I’d like to hear how things turn out,” he said.

  “You’ll be kept informed,” the major told him.

  They shook hands, and Major Liepa went on his way.

  A strange man, Wallander thought as he drove away from the airport. I wonder what he really thought of me.

  The next day was Saturday. Wallander had a nap, then drove to Löderup to see his father. He had his supper at a pizzeria, with a few glasses of red wine. All the time he was wondering whether or not he should apply for the post at the Trelleborg Rubber Company. The closing date was fast approaching. He spent Sunday morning first in the laundry room, then applying himself to the unwelcome task of cleaning his apartment. In the evening he went to the last cinema left in Ystad. It was showing an American police thriller, and he had to admit to himself that it was exciting, despite its unrealistic exaggerations.

  On Monday he was in his office shortly after 8 a.m., and had just taken off his jacket when Björk came marching in.

  “We’ve had a telex from the Riga police,” he said.

  “From Major Liepa? What’s he got to say?”

  Björk seemed embarrassed.

  “I’m afraid Major Liepa is not able to write anything at all,” Björk said uneasily. “He has been murdered. The day he got home. A police colonel, name of Putnis, signs this telex. They’re asking for our assistance, and I imagine that means you’ll have to go there.”

  Wallander sat at his desk and read the telex.

  The major dead? Murdered?

  “I’m sorry about this,” Björk said. “It’s awful. I’ll call the police commissioner and ask him to respond to their request.”

  Wallander flopped back in his chair. Major Liepa murdered? He could feel a lump in his throat. Who could have killed the short-sighted, chain-smoking little man? And why? His thoughts went to Rydberg, who was also dead. Suddenly he felt very lonely.

  Three days later he left for Latvia. It was shortly before 2 p.m. on February 28. As the Aeroflot plane swung left and flew over the Gulf of Riga, Wallander stared down at the sea and wondered what lay in store for him.

  CHAPTER 7

  The first thing Wallander noticed was the cold. He could feel no difference between standing in line at passport control and walking from the plane to the terminal. He had landed in a country where it was just as cold inside as it was out, and he regretted not having packed a pair of long johns.

  The shivering passengers moved slowly through the grim arrivals area. Two Danes distinguished themselves by complaining in loud voices about what they expected to find in Latvia. The older one had been to Riga before, and was instructing his younger colleague about the wretched atmosphere of apathy and insecurity that was characteristic of the country. These noisy Danes annoyed Wallander. It was as though he felt they should have more respect for a short-sighted police officer that had been murdered a few days earlier.

  Ten days ago he would hardly have been confident of placing the three Baltic states on the map. Tallinn could have been the capital of Latvia for all he knew, and Riga a major Estonian port. He remembered little more than bits and pieces of a geographical survey of Europe from his schooling. Before leaving Ystad he had spent two days reading up on Latvia and had gained the impression of a little country that had been oppressed by the whims of history, r
epeatedly falling victim to the sparring of the big powers. Even Sweden had marched triumphantly into this country, bloodstained and ruthless. But it seemed to him that the key moment had been in 1945, when the German war machine was crippled and the Soviet army marched into Latvia and annexed it without encountering real opposition. The attempt to set up an independent Latvian government had been savagely suppressed, and the so-called liberation army from the East, in one of the cynical twists history loves to impose, had turned into its exact opposite: a regime that ruthlessly snuffed out the sovereignty of the Latvian people.

  The two loud-mouthed Danes, who were in Riga to deal in agricultural machinery, had just reached the passport control window, and Wallander was reaching into his inside pocket for his own passport, when he felt a tap on the shoulder. He flinched, as if he’d been afraid of being exposed as a criminal, turned and was confronted by a man in a gray-blue uniform.

  “Are you Kurt Wallander?” the man asked him. “My name is Jazeps Putnis. I’m late, I’m sorry, but your flight was early. Obviously you should not be inconvenienced by the formalities. Follow me.”

  According to the telex from Riga, Jazeps Putnis held the rank of colonel. His impeccable English reminded Wallander of Major Liepa’s constant struggle for the right words and correct pronunciation. He followed Putnis through a door guarded by a soldier, and they emerged into another reception area just as shabby and dark as the last, where suitcases were being unloaded from a trolley.

  “Let’s hope there’s no delay with your luggage,” Putnis said. “May I be so bold as to bid you welcome to Latvia. And more especially, to Riga! Have you ever been here before?”

  “No,” Wallander said. “I’m afraid I never have been.”

  “Needless to say, I’d have preferred the circumstances to be different,” Putnis said. “The death of Major Liepa was very sad.”