“Why so grouchy, Peter?” Zack asks once they’ve sat down. “Are you starting to regret not opting for an interview room in Police Headquarters instead?”
“There’s nothing wrong with the place. The company is a different matter, though,” he replies.
Karlson cranes his neck and looks around. He seems worried that they might create a scene in here.
“That’s just because you haven’t got to know us yet,” Zack says, looking at the menu. “We can be very well behaved in social situations when we set our mind to it.”
“I doubt it,” Karlson says. “That seems very unlikely.”
Zack and Deniz both order steak. Karlson opts for the turbot, at 485 kronor, and says with a sneer:
“I assume you’re paying.”
When the fish arrives he sends it back, saying it’s been overcooked. Says:
“Neither of you would have dared to do that, would you? That’s the difference between people who make things happen, and those who are happy to make do with crumbs.”
Zack feels like smashing his teeth in. Deniz’s dark eyes flash almost black. Karlson notes their reactions and smiles broadly.
Zack curses himself for letting himself be provoked so easily. He sees Karlson lean back, as if he’s just realized that he’s too smart for these stupid cops, and has made up his mind to play with them.
Zack shakes off his anger and reminds himself why they’re there.
“You have an ability to express yourself in a very concise, powerful way in writing,” he says.
“Are you thinking of anything in particular?” Karlson asks.
“Yes, the letter.”
“The letter?”
“The one you sent us.”
Peter Karlson laughs, although it sounds more like a condescending snigger.
“I’m beginning to understand why the police’s clear-up rates are so appalling. Instead of professionally and systematically gathering evidence against real criminals, you harass hardworking individuals and try to scare them with fabricated allegations.”
He folds his arms on the table, leans forward, and looks first Zack in the eye, then Deniz.
“And I can guarantee that I’ve got considerably more interesting things to do than write letters to the police.”
“Do you like dogs?” Zack asks.
“They disgust me, all that licking their own backsides.”
Deniz leans over the table in the same way that Karlson just did. He is expecting a quiet, barbed remark, but instead Deniz says, loudly and clearly:
“You’re going to tell us what you know, you fucking racist.”
“You’re also seriously perverted,” Zack adds. “We know that. Reported to the police for . . .”
Zack lets the sentence die, but conversation on the nearest tables has fallen silent. The discreet sound of cutlery is the only noise. Several tables are looking at them, and Karlson looks down at the white cloth.
“I’m going now,” he says. “You can’t do this to me.”
He stands up.
They follow him.
Deniz passes her maître d’ friend on the way out.
“I’ll be back soon to pay the bill,” she says.
Karlson has a ten-yard lead on them when they emerge onto the pavement. He glances back with fear in his eyes. But his anxiety at losing face is greater than his fear of them, and he doesn’t dare take the risk of starting to run and being pursued by two police officers. Not here, not at Sturehof. He might be seen by someone he knows.
Zack and Deniz, on the other hand, have no hesitation in running. They catch up with Peter Karlson and each take hold of one of his arms.
“You’re coming with us now.”
“I want to call my lawyer,” he says quietly but firmly.
“What did you say?” Zack shouts back, as if he were talking to a ninety-year-old with poor hearing. “You need a lawyer?”
Several passersby turn to look at them.
“Okay, okay, just calm down,” Karlson hisses back.
“Like hell we will,” Deniz says.
Zack sees an open garage door a few meters farther on.
“In there,” he says, steering Karlson in the right direction.
The ground slopes sharply downward. One of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling is flickering hysterically, there’s a strong smell of gasoline, and the tarmac is covered with oil stains.
The metallically gleaming cars look like they belong to Sturehof’s clients. Zack notes that they all seem to comply with the ridiculous trend to have an X in their name: Lexus GX, Volvo XC60, BMW X3. Then he sees an old Corvette Stingray sticking out from the crowd.
There is no one in sight. They lead Karlson into a dark, urine-stinking corner and let go of him.
The fear in his eyes is clearly visible now. Karlson is alone with two police officers in a garage, and he knows they don’t wish him well. Yet he carries on spitting out his hatred at them, as if he were on a sinking ship and was desperate to have the last word.
“You pigs,” he says. “Nigger-loving idiots. Why don’t you just leave me alone? People like me keep this country going. I’m the one paying for those fuckers on benefits. Get out and deal with the real problems instead!”
“Are you the man behind the pseudonym Dirty Sanchez?” Zack asks. “Did you try to work out the masseuses’ work schedule?”
“You’re mad,” Karlson says.
He’s breathing quickly, small, shallow breaths, and Zack is prepared for some sort of attack. Desperate people often do desperate things.
“Explain what you were thinking when you wrote the letter,” Deniz says calmly.
Karlson glares at her.
“Look, you fucking cunt, you only got your job to meet the quota, so what the fuck gives you the right to humiliate a real Swede? Why don’t you go home to Rinkeby and let the state look after your eight nigger children instead, the way your sort always do when they come here.”
Zack looks at Deniz. At her clenched fists and the dead look in her eyes. Her arms are hanging limply from her body.
He decides to let it happen.
Karlson doesn’t realize the danger and just goes on goading her:
“And let me tell you what I think of those Thai whores. Killing them was an act of charity. A mercy killing. All the fucking Thai whores in this city ought to die.”
That last sentence is what does it.
All the fucking Thai whores in this city.
Exactly the same phrase as in the letter.
Zack sees Deniz’s fist fly toward Karlson’s nose. He hears the sound of bone breaking, sees the blood gush from his nose as Karlson thuds into the wall and slides down onto the tarmac.
He ends up lying on his side, covering his face with his hands. He hasn’t started to scream yet.
Deniz kicks him hard in the stomach.
Karlson gasps for breath. He looks up at her beseechingly, as if she could somehow help him get more air into his lungs.
Zack knows he should stop her now. This isn’t what we do.
But sometimes police officers do actually do this. In the best of worlds, everything is black or white, but this world is nothing but gray, gray, gray.
He thinks of the video clip of himself in Tantolunden, which was nothing compared to this. Yet people who saw it still used words like excessive brutality to describe it.
If only they knew.
Karlson finally catches his breath. He’s gasping for air with his mouth, groaning and spitting out blood.
Deniz crouches down beside him. She lifts his chin and looks at his face. Almost like Hamlet with the skull, Zack thinks.
Karlson evades her gaze.
“Give us something,” she says. “Are you Dirty Sanchez?”
Karlson hesitates.
She flicks his broken nose hard with her forefinger.
“Do you want more, worse? You know how crazy us niggers can get.”
Karlson puts his hand up to stop her.
“No, no, don’t hit me again!”
Deniz stays where she is, calm now, with her left hand holding his chin.
“Well?”
Karlson says nothing, trying to buy time to think. Deniz slaps him hard across the nose.
He lets out a scream this time.
“Okay, okay! I’ll talk.”
He catches his breath before going on:
“There’s a really crazy guy. Ingvar Stefansson. He’s talked a lot about killing immigrant whores.”
“How do you know him?”
“Don’t ask.”
“We’re asking.”
“He’s only known to the initiated. He’s really hard-core in his beliefs. Maybe a bit too much for the good of the cause. Please. Don’t hit me again.”
She lets go of his chin, and Karlson’s head drops to the bloodstained tarmac.
Deniz looks at him for a while in silence. He doesn’t dare move.
Then she tilts her head slightly and says:
“Okay, Peter. My cousins and I are going to haunt you for the rest of your life if you report this. You walked into a street lamp, okay?”
He doesn’t answer.
Deniz clenches her fist and pulls it up toward her shoulder, as if measuring a punch.
“Okay?” she says.
Karlson puts his hands up in front of his face and pulls his legs up into a fetal position without answering.
They leave him and walk out of the garage. Deniz pulls a paper handkerchief from her pocket and wipes her hands.
“My cousins? I didn’t think you were in contact with any of your family?” Zack says.
“I’m not. But idiots like that always think immigrants have forty armed cousins they can call on when it’s time to exact revenge. And who am I to crush his prejudices?”
She gets the car keys out and tosses them to Zack.
“Your turn to drive.”
27
THE DOORBELL beside the lock is the old-fashioned sort, and the harsh, monotonous sound is clearly audible through the thin door of the apartment. They listen out for signs of life, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone home. Through another door on the same floor they can hear the sound of a television with its volume turned up loud.
Zack looks at the time—7:43 p.m. A good time if you want to catch anyone at home.
They called Douglas on the way there. Didn’t say anything about Peter Karlson. Just said they’d received an anonymous but credible tip-off about someone who might have information about the murders in Hallonbergen.
Douglas sounded dubious. Said he thought they ought to go home and get some rest.
But they insisted.
“Okay, okay. Go on, then. But be careful.”
Zack rings the bell again.
The battered sign on the door says I STEFANSSON.
Leif Ingvar Stefansson. Born 1981. Taxable income: zero kronor.
That’s pretty much all that’s in the databases. No telephone number, no family. Just this residential address in Abrahamsberg.
They ring again. Keep the button pressed for a long while. No other sound from inside the apartment.
“Do you think Peter Karlson called to warn him?” Zack wonders.
“Not impossible. So what do we do?” Deniz says.
Zack takes out his key ring and holds up a picklock in response.
Deniz nods.
“I’ll keep an eye out. And we can always say it was unlocked if we find anything,” she says quietly.
Zack kneels down. Slowly inserts the pick into the old Assa lock.
He made it himself, out of a hairpin he got from Ester and a five-inch nail that he’s bent at a ninety-degree angle.
He slides the nail in first. Then the curved, pointed end of the hairpin.
These old locks are easy to pick. After just fifteen seconds the tumblers give way and he is able to turn the cylinder.
The door opens with a soft creak, letting out a smell that makes him feel sick. His mind conjures up an image of a rotting corpse on a bed somewhere in there, before he quickly changes his mind. It doesn’t really smell rotten. More stale: acrid and sweaty. A smell that reminds him of the old gymnastics mat that used to get rolled out for physical education lessons at primary school, when the class was being taught how to do somersaults. It always smelled of stale, ingrained sweat and urine, years of rolled-up angst.
Deniz follows him in. Turns her head away when the smell hits her.
Zack switches on the lamp in the hall and carries on into the apartment’s only room.
It’s like a chamber of horrors.
The first thing his eyes are drawn to are the jaws. Sharp, bone-white teeth gaping open. There are four sets hanging on the wall.
Then he sees the macabre photographs.
So many.
Enlarged pictures of mutilated Arabs. Men who have lost their legs, screaming women with dead children in their arms. Bleeding people running from smoldering buildings, men being hanged in public, their lifeless bodies swinging from nooses. Mass graves. Smashed skulls.
It’s as if all the news agencies in the world had selected their very worst twentieth-century pictures of the Middle East and East Africa and arranged them as a single huge photographic collage on this living-room wall.
Around the pictures the pale-yellow wallpaper is pretty much covered by newspaper clippings with a similar content. News about bombings, reports about al-Qaida, articles about high levels of unemployment among Somali immigrants to Sweden.
On a lot of the pictures someone has scrawled words and drawn symbols in red and black felt-tip.
“Go, go, go,” it says on one picture of an exploded building in a city that looks like it’s in Pakistan or Afghanistan. A smiley has been drawn on a newspaper clipping about Hungarian neo-Nazis, and on a ledger-size photograph of three bloody bodies, a large thumbs-up from Facebook has been stuck on.
Zack and Deniz just stare at the wall without saying a word.
Most of it seems to cover events within the past few years, but there are older clippings here and there. A black-and-white image of naked, hanged African Americans surrounded by members of the Ku Klux Klan, with a large burning cross in the background. There’s a framed photograph of Professor Vilhelm Hultkrantz from the 1920s with the caption “Founder of the Institute for Racial Biology.” Beside it is an old metal sign saying WHITES ONLY.
Zack wonders if it’s from South Africa or the American South.
“Damn . . . This is the sickest thing I’ve ever seen,” Zack says eventually.
He looks more closely at the mounted sets of jaws. He’d guess they come from wolves, but they could easily be from some other predator. From another continent, even.
He runs his forefinger along the incisors and then looks at his fingertip. No dust. Cleaned recently, then.
Or hung up recently.
After ripping the flesh from Sukayana Prikon’s legs?
He tears his eyes away from the wall and looks around the room. Piles of books, pamphlets, and documents everywhere. In the bookcase, on the coffee table, on the floor, among the plastic plants on the windowsill.
He reads a few of the titles: The Turner Diaries, White Power, The Laser Man, March towards Ragnarök.
Deniz picks up a blue-and-yellow book entitled Swedish Voices: Short Stories by the Silent Majority. She shakes her head.
“You almost can’t feel angry at this. It’s just sick.”
Zack looks back at the wall. Trying to find something that’s missing.
“He hates a lot of things, this guy. Anyone who hasn’t got white skin, from the looks of it. But can you see anything to suggest that he hates women as well? Prostitutes?”
Deniz inspects the wall. Then the books and articles on the table and floor.
“No, I agree with you. If this guy did kill those Thai women, it would be because of the color of their skin, not their gender. Which is why I don’t think it was him.”
“You’re thinking a
bout the way they were shot?”
“Yes.”
“But bear in mind what Douglas said. That could have been a red herring, an attempt to make us think the way we’ve just been doing.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know,” Deniz says, leaning over to read a racist article from the Fox News website that’s been pinned to the wall.
Zack goes back to studying some of the hate-filled pamphlets and books.
“He’s crazy, no doubt about that, but he isn’t stupid. Just listen to this title: White Supremacy as Socio-political System. A Philosophical Perspective. You’d need a sharp mind and excellent English to get through something like that.”
“It’s not too much of a surprise that he’s friends with our Hötorget acquaintance. This is starting to feel like a club for racists with university degrees,” Deniz says.
“Peter Karlson is easy to categorize, but I can’t get a grip on Ingvar Stefansson,” Zack says. “When I first noticed the smell in here I thought we were dealing with someone who’s more or less mentally handicapped. But the books and macabre pictures on the wall suggest something else entirely.”
Deniz shakes her head and says:
“It’s almost religious, don’t you think? As if we were in the home of some Nazi high priest.”
“We’ve got to talk to him,” Zack says.
“He could be anywhere.”
“He was here yesterday, at least.”
“How do you know that?”
“There was no mail on the hall floor, and he hasn’t got a NO ADS sign on the door. That means he was here yesterday to pick up the mail, at the very latest. Surely two days wouldn’t pass without a load of ads pouring in?”
Zack goes into the kitchen and opens the fridge. He has to force himself not to slam it shut instantly.
Christ, what a stink!
Breathing through his mouth, he checks the dates on the two opened cartons of milk. One has three days to go before its best-before date. The other expired a month ago.
Zack closes the fridge door and goes back to Deniz. She seems to be studying one clipping intently.
“Look at this one,” she says.
She points to a large picture beside the text. It shows a screaming crowd waving red flags and holding their hands in the air.
“What about it?” Zack says.
“See what they’re doing with their hands?”
Zack Page 18
