Annika clicked on through the mass of information on the Internet. How on earth had she ever found out anything before it existed?
She found a feature article about a book entitled Ethics and Genetic Technology: Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Genetic Technology, Stem-Cell Research and Cloning, which clarified that the most obstinate resistance to the research came from Catholic and Protestant groups. Western culture had become so individualized that embryos were regarded as having human rights.
Judaism, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any great problem with the modification of human embryos. The possibility of saving lives was seen as more important than the embryo’s human rights. Human beings acted as God’s assistants in order to improve creation; our duty was to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and to subordinate it. And if genetic research could help us do that, so much the better.
Even Islam seemed to think that stem-cell research was entirely reasonable. Most religious experts would permit such research if it benefited humanity. In their world, the embryo only becomes a complete human being when it gains a soul, which happens 120 days after conception.
So if al Qaeda was involved, the motivation wasn’t what Wiesel had in his test tubes, Annika thought, going back to Caroline von Behring.
The dead woman was in the telephone directory, with three different numbers. She was listed alongside her husband, Knut Hjalmarsson. Their home address was in Lärkstan, in the Östermalm district of Stockholm. A pretty smart part of town.
Annika tried all three numbers. The first one redirected her to a switched off cell phone with the Telia network’s anonymous message service. The second one reached a fax machine. The third one rang twenty times without anyone answering.
She put the phone down and sighed; she wasn’t going to get an article out of this. She looked at her watch: twelve thirty. She was due to pick the children up by five o’clock, at the latest. And she had to go shopping, it was her turn to cook. And it was Friday, which meant that everything had to be a bit more special than on other days. She sighed again, picked up the phone and ordered a taxi.
It had gotten colder. The snow didn’t seem to be falling as heavily because the flakes had broken up a bit. Instead they swirled around on the increasing wind, making the people on the sidewalks shiver and turn up their collars and hoods. Like a gray-black mass, they slid onward through the slush. Annika leaned back in her seat and shut her eyes to avoid seeing them.
She could feel reality fading and she let it slip away; she even dozed off with her head against the headrest of the seat, as the car zigzagged its way through the city traffic. She slept, mouth open, all the way along Sankt Eriksgatan and Torsgatan, out to the Karolinska Institute in Solna, just beyond the city boundary.
The sharp turn into the university campus made her tumble over onto the backseat, and she woke with a start. She paid, slightly groggy, and found herself standing outside a squat two-story building of brownish-red bricks with oblong windows.
The Nobel Forum, at number one, Nobels väg.
She walked over and pressed the button on the intercom.
The building seemed cool and deserted, as if it were in mourning. Annika made her way to the Nobel office and was about to knock when a disheveled woman, red-faced from crying, pulled the door open.
“What do you want?”
She was short and round, her hair henna-red, dressed in a white blouse and pale trousers.
Annika had the same uncomfortable feeling she always had when approaching the relatives and colleagues of people who had met an untimely death.
“I’d like to ask some questions about Caroline von Behring,” she said, suddenly not sure what to do with her hands.
The woman sniffed and gave her a skeptical look.
“Why? What sort of questions?”
Annika put her bag down on the floor and held out her hand.
“Annika Bengtzon,” she said, then jumped in. “From the Evening Post newspaper. Naturally we have to cover the events at the Nobel banquet last night, and that’s why we’d like to write about Caroline von Behring.”
The woman had taken her hand, hesitantly.
“I see,” she said. “So what sort of thing are you thinking of writing?”
“She seems to have been fairly withdrawn in her private life,” Annika said. “Obviously we’ll respect that. But she did have a very public role in her professional life, and I’d like to ask a few questions about her work and position as the chair of the Nobel Committee.”
“How did you know to ask for me?” the woman said.
Annika pointed at the sign on the door saying Nobel Office.
“No, no,” the woman said, taking out a handkerchief from her trouser pocket and blowing her nose. “I don’t work in there.”
She took Annika’s hand again.
“Birgitta,” she said, “Birgitta Larsén. I’m part of Carrie’s network. Or was … I suppose. The network’s still there, of course, it’s just not Carrie’s anymore. I don’t know how to put it, but I daresay you will—you work with words, don’t you?”
Annika considered how best to reply, but Birgitta Larsén wasn’t really interested.
“This is where the office staff works,” the woman said, gesturing over her shoulder, then started walking down the corridor. “The Assembly and Committee consist of professionally active professors, spread out across the campus. What do you want to know?”
She stopped and looked at Annika, as if she had only just noticed her.
“I’d just like to talk to someone who knew Caroline,” Annika said. “Someone who could tell me a bit about what she was like as a person, and as a colleague.”
Birgitta Larsén turned on her heel.
“Well, then,” she said. “Let’s find somewhere to sit down.”
The woman swept away down the corridor on clattering heels, and Annika followed her, feeling oddly clumsy. She was feeling the effects of her short nap in the taxi, and couldn’t quite shake them off.
Close to the entrance Birgitta Larsén turned sharply to the left and went into a bland conference room with an overhead projector and a little television set on wheels.
“This room is used for small meetings, such as when the Nobel Committee meets. That piece of art’s called The Mirror,” she said, pointing at some black and white squares on the east wall of the room.
Annika glanced round the room, and her attention was taken by a window oddly positioned in one corner of a large wall.
It was getting dark already; the light outside was a deep graphite-gray.
“So you work here at the Karolinska Institute as well?” Annika asked, sitting down at the circular conference table.
“I’m a professor in FBF—the Department of Physiology and Biophysics,” she explained when she saw the blank look on Annika’s face. “Carrie worked with immunology at MEM, the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Molecular Biology.”
“How well did you know Caroline?” Annika asked, holding her notebook in front of her.
The professor stopped at the window beside the television and stared out at the snow as it gradually melted away.
“We took our doctorates at the same time,” she said. “There were several of us, quite a few women, who got them the same month. That was pretty unusual in those days, even though it was only twenty-five years ago.”
She turned to look at Annika again.
“It’s crazy, the way time passes so incredibly quickly, isn’t it?”
Annika nodded without saying anything.
“Caroline was youngest, of course,” Birgitta Larsén said, “she always was.”
“From what I understand, she was very successful,” Annika said.
Birgitta Larsén sank onto a small side table.
“Successful, yes, that’s one way of putting it,” she said, sounding tired. “Caroline has been one of the foremost immunologists in Europe since the late 1980s, even if people didn’t always r
ecognize that here in Sweden.”
“What sort of research did she do?”
“She made her breakthrough with an article in Science in October 1986, to great acclaim from the entire scientific community. What she did was to develop Hood and Tonegawa’s discovery of the identification of immunoglobulin genes.”
Birgitta Larsén looked at Annika, checking for some sign that she was keeping up. Annika was unable to oblige.
“T-cell receptors, you know,” the woman said, “which Tonegawa went on to get the Nobel Prize for.”
Annika nodded, even though she really had no idea, and scribbled frantically in her notebook hood tonigawa imuglobal tcell recept.
“And you stayed good friends?”
Birgitta Larsén looked up at the artwork, The Mirror, and Annika noticed that her puffed eyes were filling with fresh tears.
“Always,” she said, pulling out her handkerchief again. “I think perhaps I knew her better than anyone.”
Annika looked down at her notebook and knew that she couldn’t back away now, she had to go on, had to get as much information as she could out of this crying, shocked woman.
“What was she like, as a person?”
Birgitta Larsén laughed suddenly.
“Vain,” she said loudly. “Caroline was born Andersson, she got the von Behring from her first husband. She kept the name when she married Knut, a name like Hjalmarsson won’t open any doors for you in the medical world, you know, whereas von Behring, on the other hand, ha! She was very happy for people to think she was related to old Emil. You know about his discovery of serum and vaccines?”
Annika nodded, yes, she knew about that.
“No children, of course, but you know that,” the woman went on. “Not that Carrie had anything against children, she’d have been happy if any had come along, but it never happened and I don’t think she minded. Does that sound strange?”
Annika took a deep breath before answering, but the professor went on:
“Carrie lived for her work, and she was a true feminist. She always made sure that women were promoted around her, even if it wasn’t exactly something she went round boasting about. If she had, she’d never have been appointed chair of the Committee—you can see that, can’t you?”
Annika carried on nodding.
“Obviously it was tough sometimes, always trying to stand up for women but never being able to fight openly for them, because if she had her position would have been at risk, and she couldn’t let that happen, could she? She was worth more as an example than as a fighter, I think most people would agree with that …”
Birgitta Larsén fell silent and looked out the window again. It was now completely dark.
“How did Caroline take the criticism of the decision to award the prize to Wiesel and Watson?”
The woman replied in an expressionless tone of voice.
“Carrie was the one who pushed through the award for their work. She knew that the whole Assembly would end up in hot water, but she went ahead anyway.”
“Do you think the attack could have had anything to do with the prize?”
Birgitta Larsén stared at Annika like she’d never seen her before.
“What did you say?” she said, her face hardening.
Annika felt suddenly clumsy and gulped.
“Or do you think it was purely an accident? That Wiesel was the target and Caroline just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
The professor stood up with a little jerk and stared at Annika.
“I don’t think I like what you’re insinuating,” she said sharply, with tears in her eyes again. “Would you go now, please?”
“What did I say wrong?” Annika asked, astonished. “Have I upset you?”
“Will you please leave this building!”
Annika gathered her things.
“Thanks for taking the time to talk to me,” she said, but the woman had turned away and was standing and staring out of the window again.
The snow had stopped falling completely and a sharp frost had taken its place.
Annika’s legs were on the point of freezing solid by the time her taxi showed up.
“The Evening Post newspaper,” the driver said when she had told him the address. “You know, I think you write a load of crap in your paper—it’s all reality television and naked exposés and dodgy politicians in your paper all the time. I never read it.”
“So how do you know what’s in it?” Annika wondered tiredly, pulling her cell phone out of her bag.
“I just know, and there’s a load of crap about Muslims as well, raping people and blowing things up …”
The man was an immigrant himself, his accent was very strong.
“Yesterday we had an article saying that most Muslim scholars want to permit stem-cell research, because the Koran says that research is beneficial to humanity,” Annika lied. “Can you turn the radio off so I can make a call?”
The taxi driver switched off the noise and didn’t say another word.
“How was the press conference?” Annika asked when Berit answered.
“The police are working with their colleagues in Germany, and are hinting that they’re close to making an arrest,” Berit said. “Spike was right about them waiting for something to happen. At the same time they’re saying that they’re not dropping other lines of inquiry, and are continuing the investigation on a number of fronts. How about you, how are you getting on?”
“Okay. I spoke to an upset work colleague. It’ll make a short piece. So what does ‘a number of fronts’ mean?”
“As far as I understand it, they’re only looking at groups close to al Qaeda. They think the Israeli was the target and Caroline’s death was an accident.”
The taxi was heading along the Solna road, across the Essinge motorway. Annika saw that the traffic in both directions was at a standstill and checked her watch. Quarter past three, the Friday rush had started.
“I don’t believe this al Qaeda stuff for a minute,” Annika said. “If al Qaeda had wanted to attack the Nobel banquet, they’d have blown the whole City Hall sky-high. They’ve never gone in for attacks focused on individuals, then run off after shooting the wrong person.”
Berit sighed down the line.
“I know,” she said, “but what can we do? This is what they’re working on, so that’s what we have to write about in the paper.”
“We can find someone who thinks it’s ridiculous,” Annika said. “Someone who can draw parallels with Hans Holmér and the whole stupid focus on the Kurds after Olof Palme was shot.”
It was no secret that the assassination of the Swedish prime minister had never been solved largely because the head of the investigation spent the whole of the first year sitting in his room dreaming up different conspiracy theories involving the PKK, the Kurdish independence movement.
“And how likely is it that we’d get an article like that published?” Berit asked tiredly, and Annika knew she was right. The paper would never publish an article that was genuinely critical of the police at a time like this: that would only lead to the police talking to their competitors and freezing them out.
“Shall we meet up in the office?” Annika said.
“I’ll probably be a while: I’m on my way to see the security guard now. Are you working this weekend?”
“No one’s asked me to,” Annika said.
“Good. Stay away,” Berit said, about to hang up.
“One more thing,” Annika said. “Why would anyone want to murder Caroline von Behring?”
“Let’s just hope that the police’s ‘number of fronts’ is broad enough to include that question …”
Annika picked Ellen up from nursery school, only a quarter of an hour late. The little girl had had a nap that afternoon, which meant that she’d be up half the night.
Kalle was at kindergarten in the next building. He collapsed in a little heap on the floor when he had to put his coat on.
“I wis
h I was dead!” he wailed and Annika let her bag fall to the floor, sat down on the little bench and pulled her son onto her lap.
“You know I love my special boy,” she whispered, rocking him back and forth. “You know you’re the most important thing in the world for me. Have you had a nice day?”
“Everyone’s stupid!” the boy yelled. “Everyone’s stupid, and you’re stupidest, and I wish I was dead!”
The first time he had announced his lack of a desire to be alive in this way Annika had been shocked into silence. A chat with a nurse at the childcare clinic had calmed her down: six-year-olds go through a minipuberty, with raging mood swings that often take extremely dramatic form.
Now four-year-old Ellen was standing there silently, staring wide-eyed at her brother. Annika pulled her daughter to her.
“Do you want to come shopping with me? Then you can choose some chips and candy?”
Kalle wiped his tears and wriggled like a worm.
“I’m going to choose the candy!” he shouted. “And I want soda!”
Annika took hold of him again and pulled him firmly toward her.
“Stop shouting now,” she said, slightly too loudly. “You can choose your candy, and Ellen can choose hers. But there’ll be no soda today.”
“I want soda!” the boy screamed, struggling to get free.
“Kalle,” Annika said, forcing herself not to shout. “Kalle, you have to calm down now, or else there won’t be any candy at all. Are you listening? Do you remember what happened last time?”
The boy stiffened in her arms, his eyes opened wide, and his breathing calmed down a bit.
“I didn’t get any candy,” he said, and his lower lip started to tremble.
“That’s right,” Annika said. “But today you can have candy, because you’ve stopped shouting and you’re not going to make a fuss about soda. Okay?”
The child nodded and Annika turned to give her daughter some attention.
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