The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  The dining room was almost as empty as it had been earlier in the evening. A group of men in dark suits were sitting around a long table at the far end of the room, speaking in low voices. To his surprise, Wallander was shown to the same table as before. He had vegetable soup, and a chop that was tough and overdone, but the Latvian beer was good. He was feeling restless so didn’t bother about coffee, and instead paid his bill and went in search of the hotel’s nightclub. The man was still on the sofa.

  Wallander had the impression of walking through a labyrinth. Various half-flights of stairs that seemed to lead nowhere brought him back to the dining room. He tried to follow the sound of the music, and eventually came upon an illuminated sign at the end of a dark corridor. A man said something Wallander didn’t understand and opened the door for him, and he found himself in a dimly lit bar. In sharp contrast to the dining room, the bar was jam-packed. Behind a curtain separating the bar from the dance floor a band was blaring away, and Wallander thought he recognized an Abba song. The air was fetid, and he was reminded once again of the major’s cigarettes. He noticed a table that seemed to be empty, and elbowed his way through the throng. All the time he had the feeling he was being watched, and realized there was every reason for him to be cautious. Nightclubs in the Eastern bloc countries were often the haunts of gangs who made a living robbing visitors from the West.

  He managed to bawl out an order to a waiter through all the noise, and a few minutes later a glass of whisky landed on the table in front of him. It cost almost as much as the meal he’d had earlier. He sniffed at the contents of the glass, imagining a plot involving spiked drinks, and drank a depressed toast to himself.

  A girl, who never told him her name, emerged from the shadows and sat down on the chair next to him. He didn’t notice her until she leaned her head over towards him, and he could smell her perfume, reminiscent of winter apples. She spoke to him in German, and he shook his head; her English was awful, worse than the major’s was, but she offered to keep him company and asked for a drink. Wallander felt at a loss. He realized she was a prostitute, but tried to put that fact out of his mind: Riga was dreary and cold, and he had an urge to talk to somebody who wasn’t a colonel. He could buy her a drink; he was the one calling the shots after all. Only very occasionally when he was extremely drunk was he likely to lose control. The last time that had happened was the previous winter, when he’d thrown himself at the public prosecutor, Anette Brolin, in a moment of anger and lust. He shuddered at the memory. That must never happen again. Not here in Riga, at least. Nevertheless, he felt flattered by the girl’s attention. She’s come to my table too soon, he thought. I’ve only just arrived, and I haven’t gotten used to this strange country yet.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “Not tonight.”

  It struck him that she was barely 20. Behind all that make-up was a face that reminded him of his own daughter. He emptied his glass, stood up and left. That was a close call, he thought. Much too close. The man in the gray suit was still in the foyer, reading his newspaper.

  Sleep well, Wallander said to himself. I’ll see you again tomorrow, no doubt.

  He slept badly. The duvet was heavy and the bed uncomfortable. Through the mists of his sleep he could hear a telephone ringing constantly. He wanted to get out of bed and answer it, but when he woke up everything was silent.

  The next morning he was woken up by a knock on the door. Only half-awake, he shouted, “Come in.” When the knock came again, he realized he’d left the key in the lock. He pulled on his trousers and opened the door to find a woman in a maid’s apron with a breakfast tray. He was surprised, since he hadn’t ordered breakfast, but perhaps that was just part of the normal service? Maybe Sergeant Zids had arranged it?

  The chambermaid said good morning in Latvian, and he tried to memorize the expression. She placed the tray on a table, gave him a shy little smile and went towards the door. He followed in order to lock it after her but instead of leaving the room, the chambermaid closed the door and put her finger to her mouth. Wallander stared at her in surprise. She slowly took a sheet of paper from the pocket of her apron, and Wallander was about to speak when she put her hand over his mouth. He could sense her fear, and knew she wasn’t a chambermaid at all, but he could also see she that she wasn’t a threat. She was just scared. He took the paper and read what it said, in English. He read it twice in order to memorize it, then looked up at her. She put her hand in her other pocket and produced something that looked like a crumpled poster. She handed it over, and when he unfolded it he realized it was the dust jacket of the book about Skåne he’d given her husband, Major Liepa, the week before. He looked up at her again. Besides the fear, her face also indicated something else—determination perhaps, or maybe obstinacy. He walked across the cold floor and fetched a pencil from the desk. On the inside of the dust jacket, which had a photograph on it of the cathedral in Lund, he wrote: I have understood. He gave her back the dust jacket, and it struck him that Baiba Liepa looked nothing like what he had imagined. He couldn’t remember what the major had said when he was sitting on Wallander’s sofa in Mariagatan in Ystad, listening to Maria Callas and talking about his wife, but the impression he’d formed was different, not of a face like hers.

  He cleared his throat as he carefully opened the door, and she melted away.

  She had come to him because she wanted to speak to him about her dead husband, the major. And she was terrified. When somebody called his room and asked for a Mr. Eckers, he was to take the elevator to the foyer, then go down the steps leading to the hotel sauna and look for a gray-painted, steel door next to the dining room’s loading bay. It should be unlocked, and when he came out into the street behind the hotel, she’d be waiting for him and would tell him about her dead husband.

  Please, she’d written. Please, please. Now he was quite certain that there had been more than mere fear in her face: there was defiance as well, perhaps even hatred. There’s something going on here that’s bigger than I’d suspected, he thought. It needed a messenger in a chambermaid’s uniform to make me realize. I’d forgotten that I’m in an alien world.

  Just before 8 a.m. he emerged from the elevator on the ground floor. There was no sign of a man reading a newspaper, but there was a man looking at postcards on a stand. Wallander went out into the street. It was warmer than the previous day. Sergeant Zids was sitting in the car, waiting for him, and bade him good morning. Wallander climbed into the backseat and the sergeant started the engine. Day was slowly breaking over Riga. The traffic was heavy, and the sergeant was unable to drive as fast as he would have liked. All the time Wallander could see Baiba Liepa’s face in his mind’s eye. Suddenly, without warning, he felt scared.

  CHAPTER 8

  Shortly before 8:30 a.m., Wallander discovered that Colonel Murniers smoked the same extra-strong cigarettes as Major Liepa. He recognized the packet, with the brand name “PRIMA,” that the colonel took out of his uniform pocket and placed on the table in front of him.

  Wallander felt as though he was in the middle of a labyrinth. Sergeant Zids had led him up and down stairs around the apparently endless police headquarters before stopping at a door that turned out to be to Murniers’s office. It seemed to Wallander that there must surely be a shorter and more straightforward way to Murniers’s office, but he was not allowed to know it.

  The office was sparsely furnished, not especially big, and what immediately caught Wallander’s interest was the fact that it had three telephones. On one wall was a dented filing cabinet, with locks. Besides the telephones there was a large cast-iron ashtray on his desk, decorated with an elaborate motif that Wallander thought at first was a pair of swans, then realized was a man with bulging muscles carrying a flag into a headwind.

  Ashtray, telephones, but no papers. The venetian blinds for the two high windows behind Murniers’s back were either half-lowered or broken, Wallander couldn’t make up his mind which. He stared at the blinds as he digested the important ne
ws Murniers had just imparted.

  “We’ve arrested a suspect,” the colonel had said. “Our investigations during the night have produced the result we’d been hoping for.”

  At first Wallander thought he was referring to the major’s murderer, but then it came to him that Murniers meant the dead men in the life raft.

  “It was a gang,” Murniers said. “A gang with branches in both Tallinn and Warsaw. A loose collection of criminals who make a living out of smuggling, robbery, burglary, anything that makes money. We suspect that they’ve recently started to profit from the drug-dealing that has unfortunately penetrated Latvia. Colonel Putnis is interrogating the man at this very moment. We shall soon know quite a lot more.”

  The last few sentences were delivered as a calm, factual and measured statement. Wallander could see Putnis in his mind’s eye, slowly extracting the truth from a man who’d been tortured. What did he know about the Latvian police? Was there any limit to what was permitted in a dictatorship? Come to that, was Latvia a dictatorship? He thought of Baiba Liepa’s face. Fear, but also the opposite of fear. When somebody telephones and asks for Mr. Eckers, you must come.

  Murniers smiled at him, as if it was obvious he could read the Swedish police officer’s thoughts. Wallander tried to hide his secret by saying something quite untrue.

  “Major Liepa led me to understand that he was worried about his personal safety,” he said, “but he gave no reason for his anxiety. That’s one of the questions Colonel Putnis ought to try and find an answer to—whether there’s a direct connection between the men found dead in the life raft and the murder of Major Liepa.”

  Wallander thought he could detect an almost invisible shift in Murniers’s expression. So, he’d said something unexpected. But was it his insight that was unexpected, or that Major Liepa really had been worried and Murniers already knew?

  “You must have asked the key questions,” Wallander said. “Who could have enticed Major Liepa out in the middle of the night? Who would have had a reason to murder him? Even when a controversial politician is murdered one has to ask whether there might have been a private motive. That’s what happened when Kennedy was assassinated, and the same was the case when the Swedish prime minister was shot down in the street some years ago. You must have thought of all this, I take it? You must also have concluded that there was no credible private motive, or you wouldn’t have asked me to come to Riga.”

  “That is correct,” Murniers said. “You are an experienced police officer and your analysis is accurate. Major Liepa was happily married. He was not in financial difficulties. He didn’t gamble, he didn’t have a mistress. He was a conscientious police officer who was convinced that the work he did was helping our country to develop. We think his death must be connected with his work. Since he was working on no other case apart from the death of the men found in the life raft, we asked for help from Sweden. Perhaps he said something to you that didn’t appear in the report he handed in the day he died? We need to know, and we hope you can help us.”

  “Major Liepa talked about drugs,” Wallander said. “He referred to the spread of amphetamine factories in Eastern Europe. He was convinced that the two men died as a result of an internal dispute within a syndicate involved in drug smuggling. He devoted much energy to trying to discover whether the men had been killed for revenge, or because they had refused to reveal something. Furthermore, there were good reasons to believe the life raft itself had been carrying a cargo of drugs, since it was stolen from our police station. What we never managed to work out was how these various things might be linked.”

  “Let’s hope Colonel Putnis gets an answer to that,” Murniers said. “He’s a very skilled interrogator. In the meantime I thought I might suggest that I should show you the place where Major Liepa was murdered. Colonel Putnis takes his time over an interrogation, if he thinks it’s worth it.”

  “Is the place where he was found the actual place where he was killed?”

  “There’s no reason to suppose otherwise. It’s a remote spot. There are not many people around the docks at night.”

  That’s not true, Wallander thought. The major would have put up a struggle. It can’t have been easy to drag him out onto a quay in the middle of the night. Saying the place is remote isn’t a good enough explanation.

  “I would like to meet the major’s widow,” he said. “A conversation with her could be important for me as well. I assume you’ve spoken to her several times?”

  “We’ve had a very detailed conversation with Baiba Liepa,” Murniers said. “Of course we can arrange for you to meet her.”

  They drove along by the river in the gray light of the winter morning. Sergeant Zids was instructed to track down Baiba Liepa while Wallander and Colonel Murniers drove out to where the body had been found, the place Murniers also claimed was the scene of the murder.

  “What’s your theory?” Wallander asked as they lounged in the backseat of Murniers’s car, which was bigger and plusher than the one Wallander had been allocated. “You must have one, you and Colonel Putnis.”

  “Drugs,” Murniers answered without hesitation. “We know the big bosses in the drug business surround themselves with bodyguards, men who are nearly always addicts themselves, prepared to do anything in order to get their daily fix. Maybe those bosses thought Major Liepa was getting a bit close for comfort?”

  “Was he?”

  “No. If that theory were correct, at least a dozen officers here in the Riga police force would have come before Major Liepa on a death list. The odd thing about this is that Major Liepa had never been involved in investigating drug crimes before. It was pure coincidence that he seemed to be the most appropriate officer to send to Sweden.”

  “What kind of cases had Major Liepa been dealing with?”

  Murniers gazed vacantly out of the car window. “He was a very skilled all-around detective. We had some robberies in Riga recently that involved murder as well: Major Liepa handled the case brilliantly and arrested those responsible. When other investigators, at least as experienced as he was, had run up against a brick wall, Major Liepa was often the officer we turned to.”

  They sat in silence as the police car stopped at some traffic lights. Wallander watched a group of people hunched against the cold at a bus stop and had the distinct impression no bus would ever come and open its doors for them.

  “Drugs,” he said. “That’s old hat for us in the West, but it’s something new for you.”

  “Not completely new,” Murniers said, “but we’ve never seen it before on the scale that is normal today. Opening up our borders has produced opportunities and a market on a completely different scale. I don’t mind admitting that we’ve sometimes felt helpless. We’ll need to develop cooperation with police forces in the West because a lot of the drugs that pass through Latvia are actually destined for Sweden. Hard currency is the bait. It’s quite clear to us that Sweden is one of the markets that the gangs here in Latvia are most interested in. For obvious reasons. It’s not far from Ventspils to the Swedish coast, and moreover, that coast is long and difficult to patrol. You could say that they’ve taken over classical smuggling routes—they used to transport barrels of vodka the same way.”

  “Tell me more,” Wallander said. “Where are the drugs manufactured? Who’s behind it all?”

  “You must understand that we are living in an impoverished country,” Murniers said. “Just as impoverished and decrepit as our neighbors. For many years we’ve been forced to live as if we were shut in a cage. We’ve only been able to observe the riches of the West from a distance. Now, all of a sudden, everything is obtainable. But there’s one condition: you need money. For someone who’s prepared to go to any lengths, who’s totally lacking in scruples, the quickest way to get that money is through drugs. When you helped us to dismantle our walls and open the gates to the countries that had been shut away, you also opened up the sluices for all manner of appetites that need satisfying. Hunger for all thos
e things we’d been forced to observe from a distance but forbidden or prevented from touching. Needless to say, we’ve still no idea how things are going to work out.”

  Murniers leaned forward and said something to the driver, who immediately braked and came to a halt by the curb.

  Murniers pointed at the façade of the building opposite them.

  “Bullet holes,” he said. “About a year old.”

  Wallander leaned forward to look. The wall really was riddled with bullet holes.

  “What is this building?” he asked.

  “One of our ministries,” Murniers said. “I’m showing you this to help you to understand. To understand why we still don’t know what’s going to happen. Will we get more freedom? Or will the freedom we have be restricted? Or disappear altogether? We still don’t know. You have to understand, Inspector Wallander, that you are in a country where nothing is yet decided.”

  They drove on until they came to a vast area of dockland. Wallander tried to digest what Murniers had said. He’d started to sympathize with the pale man with the bloated features, to feel that everything he said involved Wallander as well—indeed, maybe involved him more than anybody else.

  “We know there are laboratories making amphetamines and maybe other drugs like morphine and ephedrine,” Murniers said. “We also suspect that Asian and South American cocaine cartels are trying to establish new networks in the former Eastern bloc. The idea is that they should replace the previous routes that went straight to Western Europe. Many of these have been closed down by the European police, but the cartels believe that in the virginal East European territories they might be able to evade keen-eyed police officers. Let’s say they find us easier to corrupt and bribe.”

  “Officers like Major Liepa?”