Misterioso

by Arne Dahl

  His thoughts weren’t following any particular order.

  Once in his youth he’d tried to find out something about this loathsome name of his. Its origin went back to the thirteenth century when the Danes’ great history writer, Saxo Grammaticus, latinized the Danish word vig, meaning “battle,” and gave the name to one of King Rolf Krake’s men.

  Viggo, Jan-Olov Krake’s henchman, Norlander thought incoherently as the door opened. A man with a ponytail and wearing a jogging suit came in and sat down at the desk a couple of yards away. Norlander took a few seconds to ascertain that the man was alone.

  Then he rushed out and slammed the man’s head against the desk.

  Once, twice, three times, then four.

  Taking a firm grip on the man’s ponytail, he stuck his service revolver deep into his ear and snarled, “Little Strömstedt, you’ve got three seconds to give me the name of your mafia contact. Otherwise you’re dead, big-time. One. Two.”

  “Wait, wait, wait!” cried the man. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Three,” said Norlander and pulled the trigger.

  The gun clicked.

  “There’s a bullet in the next chamber,” said Norlander. “Be damn quick about it now!”

  The man was like jelly in his hands, thought Norlander with a rush of adrenaline. He was shaking all the way down to the bottom of his dark soul.

  He laid it on thick: “A shipment of 120 proof Estonian vodka from Liviko intended for little Strömstedt was confiscated by customs a couple of months ago. Who sent it to you?”

  “I’m just a middleman,” said little Strömstedt, shaking. “Damn it, I’ve told them everything. I don’t know anything!”

  “Right now there are other factors in play. Every complaint for police brutality that you submit is going to end up in the wastebasket. You hear me? Top priority. National security. Spit out everything you know. Now. The bullet’s in the chamber.”

  “Who the fuck are you? Dirty Harry?”

  Norlander took a chance and shot little Strömstedt’s computer to smithereens.

  “You fucker!” he bellowed, trying to twist his body around. Norlander, in turn, took an even tighter grip on the man’s ponytail until he felt the roots pull halfway out. Little Strömstedt let out a scream.

  “Igor and Igor!” he screamed. “That’s all I know! They do their own pickups!”

  “Igor and Igor are your Russian mafia contacts? Is that right?”

  “Yes, yes, yes! Damn it, that’s all I know!”

  “I know all about you,” said Norlander. “You speak Russian. You know what these guys Igor and Igor said to each other. I need more!”

  Norlander lowered his gun and aimed the barrel at the man’s hand lying on the desk.

  “A little more, please,” he said, and fired.

  The bullet passed between the man’s middle finger and ring finger, singeing the skin. Strömstedt screamed even louder.

  “Gotlanders!” he wailed.

  “Go on,” said Norlander, moving the gun until it was pointing at the man’s wrist.

  “The Gotland blackhead smugglers! They belong to the same gang! That’s all I know, I swear! They talked about Gotland and how clumsy the guys had been down there!”

  Viggo Norlander lifted Strömstedt up by his ponytail, yanked on the door handle behind his back, and hurled the man into the nearest closet. Then he barricaded the door and left him there. He could hear a flood of curses coming from inside.

  He thought they were Finland-Swedish.

  A barrier, thought Norlander as he sped away from Frihamnen. He received the go-ahead from Hultin on his cell to drive straight out to Arlanda Airport.

  A barrier had been lifted.

  Now he was really going to be fucking dangerous.

  Viggo Norlander was forty-eight years old, divorced, with no children. End of story. The bare spot on the top of his head had long ago acquired its final shape; not so his stomach, which slowly continued to grow. He wasn’t fat, just pre-fat.

  There wasn’t a single blot on his record. Nor much of anything else. He’d always been an exemplary if not always terribly active officer, whose only guides through the journey of life had been the police handbook and the book of law. He’d always believed in legal methods, in defending established society, and in the slowly grinding wheels of the justice system.

  His life had stagnated and, like his bald spot, had long ago achieved its final form. It was a deliberate stagnation. The humdrum was his very essence, the correct, the legal, what could be described in black and white. He’d always believed that people were generally like himself: hardworking, never making up excuses to take sick days, paying their taxes without complaint, and following the universal rules, with no extremes, either highs or lows.

  Everything else was shit and had to be removed.

  And in his world all law-abiding citizens intuitively wanted the shit removed, and naturally they appreciated his efforts to get it off the streets.

  No matter what he happened to encounter in the course of his daily work in the Stockholm criminal division, he still managed to retain these crystal-clear guidelines in his job and in his life. He’d always been quite satisfied both with himself and with the police force in general. In spite of occasional slumps and upticks, everything was moving in the right direction and at the right speed, which meant at a steady pace: growth, progress, development. A stable societal advancement.

  He was a tranquil man.

  He would never be able to put his finger on where the rupture first appeared, or where the wall had finally burst.

  Not even if subjected to torture would he admit to the presence of a rupture, simply because it didn’t exist in his worldview.

  But it did exist in his present world of action.

  Now as he walked through Visby, on the island of Gotland, moving along the medieval ring wall in the morning mist, his beliefs were still intact. Conditioned by trust. The lingering vestiges of the previous days. What he had done and was about to do were necessary. No more unsolved Palme murders. Legal security, he thought. Trust. Societal responsibility. Daggfeldt, Strand-Julén, Carlberger. That was enough. He would see to that.

  He was defending the most important thing of all.

  Even though he didn’t really know what it was.

  After a long walk through an almost-deserted Visby, encircled by a sort of Mediterranean morning mist as much as by the ring wall, he reached the police station. It was seven-thirty A.M.

  He went inside and was directed to the jail. There he found an officer on duty who was about his own age. They immediately recognized the policeman in each other. That was how he looked-Policeman with a capital P. And Swedish.

  “Norlander,” said Norlander.

  “Jönsson,” said Jönsson, speaking with a distinct accent stemming from both Skåne and Gotland. “Vilhelm Jönsson. We’ve been expecting you. Peshkov is ready whenever you are.”

  “I assume that you’re aware of the gravity of this investigation. There is nothing more important in Sweden today.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “So how do we do this? Does he speak English?”

  “Fortunately, he does. An old, international seaman. I assume that it would have been inconvenient to have an interpreter present. If I understood you correctly.”

  “We certainly do understand each other. Where is he?”

  “In a soundproof room, as agreed. Shall we?”

  Norlander nodded, and Vilhelm Jönsson led the way along several corridors, recruiting a couple of guards from the break room as they walked past. Then they all went down to the basement. The four men stopped outside a gray-painted steel door with a peephole.

  Jönsson cleared his throat. “As you’ve explained,” he said, “because this investigation is classified, and for other reasons as well, we won’t be allowed to participate in the interrogation, but we’ll stand guard outside. Here’s the panic button. Press it and we’ll be inside in a seco
nd.”

  Norlander accepted the little box with the red button. He put it in his pocket. “Don’t look unless you have to,” he said calmly. “The less you know, the better. That way any eventual complaints will be directed to NCP management. It’s for the best.”

  They unlocked the door and let him in. A table, two chairs, padded walls. Nothing more. Except for a small man wearing prison garb sitting on one of the chairs. A sharp face, skinny biceps. The sinewy, ropy muscles of a sailor, thought Norlander, assessing the man’s potential strength to resist-it wouldn’t be in his body, at any rate. The man stood up and greeted Norlander politely, “How do you do, sir?”

  “Very brilliant, please,” said Norlander, placing a notebook and pen on the table before sitting down. “Sit down, thank you.”

  The conversation proceeded, although not without certain linguistic infelicities. In the same knotty English, Norlander continued, “Let’s get right to the point, Mr. Alexey Peshkov. During a bad winter storm you and your crew ditched a hundred and twelve Iranian, Kurdish, and Indian refugees in two rubber rafts hundreds of yards off the east coast of Gotland, then headed back to Tallinn in your fishing boat. But the Swedish coast guard managed to stop your vessel before it left Swedish waters.”

  “Very straight to the point,” said Peshkov.

  Since irony wasn’t Norlander’s strong suit, his attempt to imitate Hultin’s icy tone came out a bit abruptly. “I need information,” he went on, “about the serial killings of Swedish businessmen that have occurred in Stockholm over the past few days.”

  Alexey Peshkov’s jaw dropped. After he managed to close it again, he blurted out, “You must be joking!”

  “I am not joking,” said Norlander and continued in the same calm manner. “If you don’t give me the information I want, I have the authority to kill you right here and now. I’m specially trained for that. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not buying this,” said Peshkov, eyeing Norlander’s slightly flabby build. At the same time, Norlander’s utterly composed steadiness of purpose brought a dubious expression to the man’s face. Norlander hammered home the point:

  “We know that you’re part of a Russian-Estonian crime group headed by Viktor X, and that a couple of booze smugglers calling themselves Igor and Igor are in the same group. Correct?”

  Peshkov didn’t say a word, but now he was on the alert.

  “Correct?” Norlander repeated.

  Still not a word.

  “This is a soundproof room. Nothing that takes place in here will be heard by anyone else. The powers that I’ve been granted have no limit; they come from the highest authority. I want you to understand that and think carefully before you answer. Your personal welfare depends on the next answer you give.”

  Peshkov closed his eyes; he seemed to think that he must be dreaming. This was something quite different from the good-natured Swedish police officers he’d met so far. Maybe he saw the glint of something monstrous in Norlander’s eyes. Maybe he’d seen that glint before.

  “This is a democracy,” he said cautiously.

  “Of course,” said Norlander. “And it’s going to remain so. But occasionally every democracy has to defend itself by using undemocratic means. Any sort of defense is actually by definition undemocratic. This is one instance when that will be made abundantly clear.”

  “I’ve been in here for two months. I know absolutely nothing about any serial murders in Stockholm. I swear it.”

  “Viktor X? Igor and Igor?” said Norlander, in exactly the same tone. Somehow he realized that it was important not to change it.

  Alexey Peshkov calculated the risks.

  Norlander clearly saw that the man was contemplating the best way to postpone his own death for as long as possible. He gave him time to think but also slipped his hand into his jacket pocket. The sound of him clicking off the safety on his gun seemed to echo off the walls.

  Peshkov sighed deeply. “I was a seaman on international routes during the entire Communist era. I kept out of the clutches of the KGB and GRU by constantly changing my identity. I scraped enough money together to buy my own fishing boat when the regime fell. For about a year I was an ordinary Russian-speaking fisherman from Tallinn, a bit oppressed but free.

  “You might say that was our only free year, because then other forces came into play. I was contacted by anonymous protectors. First it was just money they wanted, payment for not setting fire to my boat or blowing it up. The usual protection racket. But soon it began to escalate. I was ordered to take on… transports of this type. This was my third. Tens of thousands of desperate refugees are stuck in the old Soviet Union, just waiting to be fleeced.

  “I’ve never been anywhere near the boss; Viktor X is just a name, a myth. My contact was an Estonian by the name of Jüri Maarja. He’s supposedly close to Viktor X. I’ve never heard of any Igor and Igor, but the group has lots of booze smugglers, as well as all sorts of other smugglers in Northern Europe.”

  Norlander was surprised by the man’s sudden volubility but didn’t let it show. “Addresses? Contact places?” he said quietly.

  Peshkov shook his head. “They keep moving them around.”

  Norlander studied Peshkov for a good long time. He couldn’t decide whether the man was a victim or a criminal or both. He slapped his notebook against the table and stuck his pen in his breast pocket. “I’ll be leaving for Tallinn now. If it turns out that a single detail of what you’ve told me is wrong, or if it turns out that you haven’t told me everything, I’ll be back. Do you understand what that means?”

  Peshkov stared down at the table without saying a word.

  “Last chance to change or add anything,” said Norlander, standing up.

  “That’s all I know,” Peshkov said, sounding resigned.

  Viggo Norlander suddenly held out his hand toward Alexey Peshkov. The Russian-Estonian fisherman reluctantly got up and shook hands.

  “How do you do, sir?” said Norlander.

  Peshkov gave him a look that he would never forget.

  Tallinn was a crazy city.

  That’s what Viggo Norlander thought after being there only fifteen minutes. Later on he would by no means change his opinion.

  He had trouble getting a rental car at the airport. Finally he headed out into the chaotic afternoon traffic, struggling to find his way with the help of an English-language tourist map. He ended up in Old Town, on the slopes of Toompea Hill, circling around as if inside a medieval labyrinth. Since he kept coming upon ancient walls with magnificent tall defensive turrets, he almost thought he was still in Visby.

  But in reality the city was nameless, a mere backdrop for his single-minded purpose. Street signs, traffic signs, billboards in a foreign language-it was like in a movie. He was a stranger and wanted to stay that way. Everything should remain nameless, no more than a backdrop. Nothing would be allowed to distract his attention. He felt as if new blood were pumping through his body. This was what he was meant for. Enduring all those idle hours in life just so he could arrive at this specific moment.

  Finally he located the big, modern police headquarters. He parked illegally and went inside. He entered the reception area, a small room where the old Soviet bureaucratic drabness fought in vain against the modern Western interior design. In the same way, the duty officer was both accommodating and dismissive in a strange mixture that Norlander had never encountered before. Under other circumstances he might have been surprised. Now he was merely stubborn.

  “Superintendent Kalju Laikmaa,” he said for the third time in his broken English. “He’s expecting me.”

  “I don’t see any Swedish police officer in my authorization documents,” said the young man, managing to sound both stern and apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he added for the third time.

  “At least give him a call,” said Norlander with composure, using the icy tone that had proved so successful at the Visby jail. Finally the duty officer did as he asked. He sat for a while with the phon
e receiver expertly held between his shoulder and chin as he stirred his cup of coffee. When he finally spoke, his words sounded like Finnish with a bunch of misplaced os. Eventually he hung up and said with politely disguised annoyance: “The superintendent will come down and get you, Mr. Norrland.”

  “Please,” said Mr. Norrland courteously.

  It took only a minute before he heard the elevator in the lobby of police headquarters, and out stepped a fair-haired man wearing a wrinkled corduroy suit and glasses of the type that were handed out free of charge when Norlander was doing his military service in the distant past.

  “Norlander, I presume,” said the man, holding out his hand. Norlander shook it. The man had a firm handshake. “I’m Laikmaa.”

  They got in the elevator and rode up to the fifth floor.

  “You could have told me that you were on your way,” said Laikmaa, speaking with an elegant East Coast American accent. “Then we could have avoided all the trouble.”

  “I wanted my arrival to go unnoticed, as much as possible,” said Norlander, resorting to the icy tone that was by now well practiced. “There’s too much at stake.”

  “I see,” said Laikmaa drily. “Over here businessmen as well as others are dying in hordes. We’re living in a new climate of violence. Everybody interprets the laws of the market economy any way they like. What was suppressed under the Soviets is now bubbling up with all the force we had expected. Our job was undoubtedly easier when we were the tools of the oppressor, but hardly more pleasant. We now live in a state within a state that has exactly the same ability to infiltrate as the union of states did in the past. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if your arrival is already known within certain circles. We need to be very careful at all times about what we say and reveal. Just like before. There are ears everywhere. Come in.”

  They went into a pleasant little office. Dead plants lined the sills of the windows facing Old Town and the castle with its imposing tower, called Pikk Hermann. But for Norlander the view didn’t exist. He sat down in the visitor’s chair in front of Laikmaa’s desk.