by Arne Dahl
He still thought she was beautiful: her blond hair in its slightly disheveled page boy; the years that had gathered the right way, around her eyes instead of her waist; her gift for dressing sexily. And then her penetrating looks, too seldom in use these days.
He loved to be seen through; this was an insight he’d had late in life, but that’s how it was. To be seen through is to be seen a second time, and that didn’t happen so often. Because first impressions last—he hated that an advertisement was echoing through him.
“Something happened at work,” she declared.
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said happily.
“What happened to your lip?”
“You’ll have to watch it on TV.”
They chatted a bit until Norsborg. He turned the job talk in her direction. She was a nurse on a rehab floor at Huddinge and was always ready with a heap of tragicomic stories. This time it was a brain-damaged patient who had urinated in the purse of one of her colleagues; the woman didn’t notice until she went to take out her SL card at the commuter train turnstile.
As they walked with their arms around each other through the outskirts of a neighborhood that everyone considered to be a high-rise ghetto and that had once, what seemed like a very long time ago, been his workplace, and as the sun generously shared the nuances that had been well hidden during the day, and as a bit of summer warmth lingered in the air, and as the wasps buzzed in that dull, dying way, Paul Hjelm decided that this was what love looked like once you stepped into middle age. It could be worse.
They arrived home. Danne looked as if he’d been spilled onto the sofa; he was watching MTV. A social studies book with crumpled pages was open on the table. He was downing greenish soda. “It’s past seven,” the boy accused.
“I told you there was food in the fridge,” said Cilla, who began to unpack a shower curtain with gold Egyptian hieroglyphs on a dark green background.
“We ate,” said Danne without taking his eyes from the MTV screen. “What kind of fucking sludge was that?”
“Mexican fucking sludge,” Cilla said calmly, holding up the new shower curtain she’d bought. Apparently she was awaiting a statement from her husband.
“What does it say?” he said.
She made a face and carried it to the bathroom.
He opened a beer and called, “Maybe it’s Egyptian porn!”
Danne glared at him from the sofa.
After a few minutes she returned with the old shower curtain and showed him the horrible accumulation of mold: two small black spots down in the corner.
“What does this say about our household?” Cilla asked rhetorically, fingering the spots with disgust.
“That we take showers,” said Paul Hjelm.
She sighed and crumpled the old curtain into an overflowing garbage can. Then she took out the remains of the Mexican fucking sludge, put the plastic container in the microwave, sat down in front of the TV, and changed the channel.
Without a word, Danne took the remote and changed it back.
As Hjelm poured beer down his throat, he thought about how he had seen this scene before. Three thousand, four hundred, and eighty-six times. “What time is it?” he asked.
“Nineteen-oh-six and thirteen seconds,” said Cilla. She had just countered her son by pushing the text-TV button. Now a dark curtain of letters fell down across the MTV-filled screen.
“In just under four minutes, the clock will chime,” boomed the voice of the master. “I want to watch the local news.”
The battle on the sofa continued in silence. Thus far it had been a game. He hoped it would remain so.
The microwave dinged. Tova came down the stairs and groaned when she saw the spectacle on the sofa.
“Hi,” Hjelm said to his fourteen-year-old daughter.
“Hi,” she said. “You’re so late.”
“Cut it out.” He poured the Mexican fucking sludge onto two plates, dug out two spoons, poured two beers, and managed to balance it all as he brought it over to the living room sofa.
“Isn’t that a schoolbook?” he said to his son, who was attacking the pocket where Cilla had shoved the remote.
“Cut it out,” Danne echoed, as he pulled out the remote and got MTV back. It was on a commercial break, so he gave in. The paternal hand snatched the remote, changed it to channel two, and turned up the volume. There was about a minute left before the local news.
Hjelm had time to ask, “How’s school going?”
His son had just started upper secondary school, and Paul had devoted only a few wasted hours to trying to understand the school system. Danne was in something that went by the name “Program in Social Sciences,” and his lessons seemed decidedly simpler than the process of figuring out the curriculum.
“Good,” said Danne.
The theme music of the local news came on, just as abbreviated as his son’s reply.
“Here comes some great television art,” said Paul Hjelm. The rest of the family looked at him skeptically.
It came on right away. The anchorwoman spoke excitedly about a big crackdown on narcotics at Arlanda this morning—and about the dramatic assault of a top police officer in front of their cameras. Sensitive viewers were warned. Hjelm’s expectations rose.
Then Waldemar Mörner, the deputy commissioner of the National Police Board and the A-Unit’s formal boss, appeared on the screen.
His well-coiffed blond hair was impeccable, but he was breathing heavily, as though he had just personally chased some criminals through Arlanda. Presumably he had just tumbled out of the helicopter before he had any idea of what had happened; perhaps he had been jogging in place inside the helicopter. Neither his breathing nor his ignorance stopped him from looking confident and efficient—or from lying with no inhibitions.
“Waldemar Mörner, deputy commissioner of the National Police Board,” the reporter began. “What happened at Arlanda today?”
“The NCP acted on indications from the American police that a large quantity of narcotics would arrive at Arlanda today from the United States. I can’t go into specifics on the action itself.”
“Has anyone been apprehended?”
“At least one American citizen has been taken into custody in connection with smuggling narcotics, yes. We are expecting further apprehensions shortly.”
A man in handcuffs was seen at the edge of the screen. Hjelm recognized the notorious drug smuggler Robert E. Norton, surrounded by four armed Arlanda police officers. As they watched, he managed to kick Mörner’s backside, knocking Mörner over with a shrill cry. When he fell, he grabbed the microphone, so the reporter followed him to the floor. The microphone cord must, in turn, have been wound around the cameraman’s legs, because he plunged to his face. Over the lengthy footage of Arlanda’s ceiling, they could hear the cameraman whimpering, the reporter moaning, and Mörner’s verbal gunfire: “Fuckinghellgoddamndildofuck.”
The producer didn’t cut until then; it wasn’t hard to imagine his sadistic smile.
Yet it was too early for the anchorwoman in the studio. As the camera caught her, she shouted in a panic, “Am I really supposed to read this?” When she realized she was on the air, she pulled herself together and struggled heroically to keep her composure as she read “Fortunately, no one was seriously injured in the drug dealer’s attack. Our reporter, however, suffered some oral injuries when the microphone, which had been pushed into his mouth, was removed.”
On the sofa in Norsborg, no one was required to keep their composure. When the gales of laughter ebbed, Paul returned the remote control to Danne. He caught Cilla’s glance. As she dried her tears and restored her face, her eyes were serious. She realized something was brewing.
They went to bed rather early; both had long days at work ahead. Danne was allowed to keep watching MTV; it wasn’t an evening when they really had the energy to be responsible parents. Experience told them that he was probably doing his homework as he watched.
Neither of them c
ould really understand how multitasking could be so quickly upgraded.
“What’s going on?” Cilla asked with a flashing spark of attention as sleep tried to envelop her.
“Nothing yet,” Paul said as he unpacked a few books onto the nightstand. “But the risk that something will happen has increased.”
“And what about the wound on your lip?” she said more faintly.
“The TV celebrity,” he snickered. “The one who kicked Mörner in the ass.”
“Is it really all about drugs?”
“No,” he sighed. “This thing kills faster.”
She was already halfway into the realm of sleep. “A weapon?”
“Not exactly. It’s best if I don’t say more. But there’s a risk that I’ll have to put in some overtime. Good thing summer’s over.”
Then she was asleep.
He patted her cheek, then turned to the pile of books on the nightstand. On his way back from Marieberg he had stopped by the library at Fridhemsplan and looked up “Hassel, Lars-Erik,” in the new computer system. He got hold of the Maoist manifesto from 1971 and two parts of the somewhat later documentary novels.
The manifesto was unreadable—not for ideological reasons, but because it presupposed an understanding of the technical terminology of dialectical materialism. Hjelm didn’t understand a word. And this was written by the man who later freely lambasted Swedish authors with accusations of elitism.
The documentary novels, though, were profoundly educational. The plot of one centered on a manor in Västmanland at the turn of the century. Step by step the reader could follow each class, from the landowner, whose inherited brutality was hidden behind fancy upper-class manners, to the oppressed farm laborers’ heroic struggle for their daily bread. Hjelm was vaguely familiar with the concept. The problem was that everything was hyperidealized. The message overshadowed the characterizations. The uneducated masses had to be schooled in politics. It was like a medieval allegory, an undisguised textbook in the true faith. The censorship of sleepiness was relentless.
The day on which one of Sweden’s last levees broke ended with yet another assault on a police officer. Just as the living room clock struck midnight, Lars-Erik mounted a posthumous attack on Paul Hjelm: the right corner of The Parasite of Society struck his left eyebrow.
The Kentucky Killer’s visit to Sweden entered its second day.
8
Arto Söderstedt lived with his wife and five children in the inner city and thought it wonderful. He was convinced that the children thought it wonderful too, from the three-year-old to the thirteen-year-old. Every time he dropped them off at day care and school, he found himself surrounded by self-tormentors who were convinced that their children’s greatest dream was to have their own garden patch to romp around in. He often thought about the psychosocial mechanisms that caused the majority of inner-city parents to have a constant guilty conscience.
The suburban parents he met were different. All of them made an extreme effort to convince their friends that they had found heaven on earth. As a rule, upon closer inspection, the heaven that was suburbia turned out to consist of three things: one, you could let the children out in the yard and avoid being in their vicinity; two, it was easier to park your car; and three, you could grill outdoors.
The tension-loaded contradiction between thwarted conscience and inflated self-esteem often resulted in yet another family moving van heading north, south, or west.
Söderstedt had seen the grass on both sides of the fence. When the A-Unit was made permanent, his family had moved from Västerås, with its private homes, to Bondegatan on Södermalm. Personally, he didn’t miss the forced interaction with neighbors he had nothing in common with, nor the competition-oriented self-righteousness that came with homeownership, nor the fixation on the car, nor the enormous distance to everything, nor the useless public transportation system, nor the barbecue parties, nor the tranquil state of vegetation, nor the artificial proximity to nature, nor the predictable discussions about hoses, nor the lawn and the garden that sucked up more time than money, nor the architecture that lacked history and fantasy, nor the empty roads, nor the absolute lack of culture. And when it came to the children, he had produced a small list of arguments for use by inner-city parents when aggressive suburbanites pressed them up against the wall with accusations of child abuse. Memories of childhood follow a person throughout his entire life, and if these memories are of playgrounds, gravel lots, and lonely roads rather than diverse building facades, church steeples, and people, then that’s a deciding factor. In the city the likelihood that a child will get a good education is greater, visits to the theater and museums are considerably more numerous, access to activities is enormous, encounters with people of all sorts are legion. In general, in the city one’s powers of observation and vigilance are developed in a way that lacks a counterpart outside.
What struck Söderstedt now, as he sauntered through this very city, was that this whole manner of thinking was dictated by a drummed-in guilty conscience.
What kind of societal stereotypes truly determined the picture of happiness?
Not, in any case, the five-room apartment on Bondegatan where the seven-person household was without doubt a bit cramped. The question was whether it really mattered that much.
Since Anja had taken care of the day’s deliveries of their children, he permitted himself to walk from Söder to Kungsholmen; he had a feeling that it would be the last time he would be allowed that luxury for a long time. When he stepped into the police station on that beautiful early-autumn morning, he continued straight to the service vehicle pool and checked out a robust Audi. He pocketed the keys and stepped into the elevator.
Arto Söderstedt caught a glimpse of himself in the elevator mirror. He’d made it through another summer without getting skin cancer, he thought, looking for some wood to knock on. He had the kind of skin that only Finns and Englishmen have, he thought with jovial prejudice, the absolutely white-through kind that doesn’t have a chance of turning anything other than red in the sun. It was the fourth of September, and he had just managed to take the crucial leap from SPF 15, the variety for newborns, to SPF 12.
Actually, he liked autumn best.
Except maybe not this autumn.
He had read up on serial killers in connection with the Power Murders, and as usual he found himself giving a few lectures to the group. Since then he had rationed them out. He was afraid that the time for rationing would soon be over. Sweden’s last levee had broken, and violent crime of an international character, to cite a familiar source, had arrived. It would hardly be an isolated incident.
The fact was, he recognized the Kentucky Killer. He had read about him and vaguely remembered him. He had been one of the first in a long series of such killers.
There was something strange about his modus operandi, something that didn’t really match up with the profile of a serial killer. Those terrifying pincers … he couldn’t put his finger on it, but something was wrong. He needed to speak directly with Ray Larner at the FBI, but he didn’t know how to get past Hultin. Certainly Hultin was the best boss he’d ever worked under, but he lacked Söderstedt’s own insights into the gray areas of the workings of justice. Söderstedt had once been a defense attorney, one of the most prominent in Finland, and he had defended the worst of the worst in the upper echelons. Then his conscience had rebelled; he’d quit, fled to Sweden, enrolled in police college at a slightly advanced age, and settled down as a policeman in Västerås. He had gotten it into his head that an attorney’s role as a vicarious criminal could be useful in this case. There had to be some sort of identification in order to catch a serial killer, he knew that.
So lost was he in his reflections about inner-city parents and serial killers that he didn’t notice he was late. Which wasn’t like him. So he was quite surprised to open the door to “Supreme Central Command” and find not only everyone already gathered there but Waldemar Mörner himself sitting at Hultin’s
lectern, drumming his fingers.
Because he hadn’t had a chance to prepare himself for the confrontation, he burst into spontaneous peals of laughter. This didn’t go over very well. Mörner looked audaciously fresh, unaffected by the incident at Arlanda, but Söderstedt’s laughter caused him to put a small, permanent mental mark on Söderstedt’s record. He wrinkled one eyebrow for a short but murderous second. Then he was himself again.
“I hope lateness won’t become a habit for you, Söderstedt,” he said sternly. “We’re facing a task of a nature we have never come close to in modern times in this country. But tempus fugit, and we will too. Don’t allow the four complaints from Arlanda to disturb your work; instead let’s move forward with the extensive investigation.”
“Four?” said Norlander.
“Currently,” Hultin said neutrally.
Mörner didn’t hear them but continued with glowing passion: “After extensive work in the upper echelons, I have persuaded them that this case should be entrusted into your warm hands, and I sincerely hope that you don’t fall short of the confidence that I have placed in you. Inasmuch as a mustering of strength is needed, I urge you to develop expanded horizons and widened scopes. Your joint capital is firmly rooted in the visions of the management team, and the future looks bright. The light is visible at the end of the tunnel. Ahead of your great burden lies a fair reward. Seize the day, make the most of every minute, pull out all the stops. Work hard now, gentlemen. And lady, of course. Lady. The welfare of Sweden rests in your hands.”
With these words of wisdom, Mörner departed, glancing at the clock.
The room fell silent. Language itself seemed to have become constipated. After this address, no word would be innocent. Any one might become a weapon of murder aimed at the heart of the Swedish language.
“With friends like that, who needs enemies?” Hultin said neutrally, grasping wisely at a proverb in order to normalize the linguistic situation. “I have spent the night with the Kentucky Killer,” he continued.
“Then he ought to be easy to locate,” said Söderstedt, who hadn’t quite collected himself yet.
