by Arne Dahl
“But he’s right that we have to think past him.”
“Are you sure?”
They looked at each other. Their jet lag, combined with the overdose of impressions, made them giggle foolishly. Their exhaustion was about to get the better of them. Hjelm liked the irresponsible stubbornness that had fallen upon them; their defense mechanisms were starting to be taken out of the game.
“Shall we say to hell with Schonbauer’s tour?” he asked.
“Can you be diplomatic and let him know in a nice way?”
“You’re the diplomat.”
“In theory. This is in practice. You were much better at it than I was.”
“I was just absent-minded,” he said, dialing Schonbauer’s number. “Jerry, this is Paul. Yalm, yes, Yalm. We’re going to try to work on this as long as we can manage, and then we’ll let our jet lag take over. Can we put our tour of Manhattan off until tomorrow? Good. Okay. ’Bye.”
He hung up and exhaled. “I think he was relieved.”
“Good,” said Holm. “Should we get an overview of what we have and let the details wait? I’ve had enough details for today.”
The computers contained all the necessary information. Detailed lists of all the victims. Folders with all the crime-scene investigations. Folders for every individual case investigation. Expert psychological profiles of perpetrators. Folders with all the autopsy results. Folders with all the press cuttings. Files with descriptions of weapons, FYEO.
“What does that mean?” Hjelm asked.
“For your eyes only. This must be where he has the top-secret details that connect the first round with the second.”
They glanced through the files; an incredible amount of information. How the hell could they add to this enormous investigation even a tiny bit? It seemed hopeless enough to motivate them to stop working. They turned their computers off after the countdown “one potato two potato three potato four!” and felt blissfully frivolous.
“Do you think we can run away from the FBI?” said Kerstin Holm.
Of course it would have been an experience to get out and see New York by night, but they weren’t disappointed that they’d declined Jerry Schonbauer’s offer. They enjoyed a quiet dinner in the hotel restaurant instead. It was two a.m. in Sweden, nine o’clock local time, when they came down to the lobby and looked for the restaurant in the restaurant. It was, in other words, very small.
Skipper’s Inn continued to play at being an English inn. What the restaurant lacked in variety and elaborateness, it made up for in quality. They chose one of the two possible entrées, beef Wellington, and a bottle of Bordeaux in an unfamiliar brand, Château Germaine. They sat at a window table and got at least a small, indirect view of Manhattan’s street life. The little restaurant, where they had been the first guests, filled up, and soon all twelve tables were occupied.
Paul Hjelm was struck by another sensation of déjà vu. Last time they had sat alone, enjoying a quiet dinner in a restaurant in an unfamiliar place, the consequences had been unmistakable. He squirmed slightly, thinking of Cilla and the children and the sense of family that they had so strenuously won back. He thought of the extreme temptation that the woman on the other side of the table still represented, of how she invaded his dreams and remained a pressing mystery. She had put on a modest but noticeable amount of makeup and had changed into a little black dress with tiny straps that crisscrossed her otherwise-bare back. She was so small and thin, and her face seemed smaller than usual within the frame of her dark, slightly messy pageboy. Had she fixed herself up on purpose?
He couldn’t help saying, “Do you remember the last time we sat like this?”
She nodded and smiled, incredibly attractively. “Malmö.”
That husky Gothenburg alto. Her duets with Gunnar Nyberg echoed in his ears. Schubert Lieder. Goethe poems. Was he trying to get away or to get closer? When he opened his mouth, he didn’t know what his next step would be. He let it happen.
“That was one and a half years ago,” he said.
“Soon,” she said.
“You remember?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You know …”
The social wreckage bobbed on the surface. He tried to force it down and said abruptly, “What was it that happened?”
She could interpret that as she wished. She was quiet, then said at last, “I had to go another way.”
“Where to, then?”
“As far as possible from work. I was close to quitting.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No one knew besides me.”
Not even him? He thanked his creator that he didn’t say it.
“Not even him,” she said.
He didn’t question it. She could go whatever way she wanted or needed to.
“After you and your agonizing over decisions, I planned to live without a man,” she said quietly. “I needed time to think. Then I met him, a silly coincidence. He kept calling at work, too, so soon everyone knew I had a new man. What no one knew was that he was sixty and a pastor in the Church of Sweden.”
Hjelm said nothing.
With her eyes on her fork, she poked distractedly at the half-eaten beef Wellington. “No one thinks you can have a passionate relationship with a sixty-year-old pastor in the Church of Sweden. But that’s what it was. That’s the only kind of relationship I seem able to handle these days.”
She looked out to the crowds of people on West Twenty-fifth Street. “He’d been a widower for twenty years,” she continued in the same slightly droning, toneless voice. “The pastor in the church where I sang in the choir. He cried when I sang, came up, and kissed my hand. I felt like a schoolgirl who finally got some attention. I was a daughter and a mother at the same time. After a while, out of that, a woman was reborn.”
She continued to avoid his gaze.
“There was so much unfinished in that man, but he finished a little of it with me. He carried so much quiet and lovely life wisdom—I don’t know if it’s possible to understand—an ability to enjoy the little gift of every day. If nothing else, he taught me that.”
“What happened?”
She finally looked at him for a split second, her eyes slightly veiled but very much alive. “He died.”
He took her hand and held it, unmoving. Both looked out onto the street. Time nearly stopped.
“He was already dying when we met,” she continued quietly. “I didn’t realize that until now. He had so much life in him and wanted to pass it on. Give a farewell gift to the living. I hope he got a little bit of me to take with him. Some passion, if nothing else.”
He had stopped thinking of how he ought to act and just listened. It was nice.
“It went quickly. He was actually supposed to go through his third round of chemotherapy. He didn’t bother—he chose one last period of health instead of a fight to the finish. I kept a vigil over him for a week, every day after work. That was last spring. It was like he just shrank up. But he smiled almost the entire time. That was strange. I don’t know if it was the giving or the taking that made him happy. Maybe just the exchange. As though he had received one last insight into the mysteries of life and could await the big mystery without fear.”
She turned to him for another split second, as if to make sure he was listening. He was. She turned away again.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Those pictures today … you think you can prepare yourself, but you can’t. You think you’ve seen everything, but you haven’t. It’s like there were different deaths. My pastor friend was in pain, too, horrible pain, but he smiled. There were no smiles here, just the horrific faces of suffering, like a frieze of horrible medieval pictures of Christ, made to strike terror into the viewer. A warning. Like he’s trying to warn us away from life, as medieval prelates were. And he almost succeeds.”
“I don’t know,” Hjelm tried. “I don’t really see a message in what he does. I think looking at those bodies is more like being confronted with waste pr
oducts, remainders, industrial waste, if you know what I mean. It feels like the mechanical, industrial deaths of Auschwitz. If anything can ever feel like that …”
Now she looked into his eyes. She had gotten what she needed. There and then, in her deep, distressed, empty eyes, he saw the spark ignite again. The fabulous inexhaustibility of her eyes.
He wondered what she saw in his face. A clown who runs around trying to hide his erection? He hoped there was a trace of something more.
“Maybe they’re not incompatible,” she said, and her newfound energy didn’t erase her thoughtful tone. “Expressing contempt for life and clinical perfection in one and the same action. It is one and the same action, after all.”
They sank into pondering. The professional and the private blended uncontrollably into each other. Nothing in this life was isolated.
He sensed that it was his turn. He took her hand again.
She didn’t resist.
“Was what we had before just sex?” he asked without quavering. “Is there such a thing as ‘just sex’?”
She smiled a bit grimly and kept hold of his hand.
“There probably isn’t,” she said. “And in any case, what we had wasn’t that. It was—confusing. Too confusing. I had just gotten out of a hellish relationship with a man who raped me without understanding that that’s what he was doing. He was a policeman, you know that much, and then I ended up with another policeman who was the complete opposite. Hard-boiled and full of bright ideas as a cop, tender and awkward privately. The pictures got all mixed up. I had to get away from it. You fled back into the bosom of your family. I didn’t have anything like that, so I fled in my own way.”
“In one way, life is easier than ever,” said Paul. “In another, it’s harder.”
She looked into his eyes. “How do you mean?”
“I don’t really know. I have this feeling that the walls are closing in around us. We’ve cracked open the door, but now it’s being closed again. And the walls are beginning to creep in.” He was searching for words, but it was going slowly. He was trying to formulate things he had never formulated before. “I don’t know if it’s comprehensible.”
“I think it is,” she said. “You actually have changed.”
“A little bit, maybe,” he said, and paused. “Just a little on the surface, but it has to start somewhere. Our inherited patterns of habit break us down before we even get a chance to start living. I haven’t gone through any revolutionary outer changes, as you have; it’s actually been a pretty uneventful year. But a few new possibilities have opened up.”
She nodded. The conversation died away but seemed to be continuing inside them. Their eyes drifted away into nothing. Finally she said, “I’m starting to understand how important it is that we catch him.”
He nodded. He knew what she meant.
They left the restaurant and walked hand in hand up the stairs. They stopped outside his room.
“What should we say?” she said. “Seven?”
He sighed and smiled. “Okay, breakfast at seven o’clock.”
“I’ll knock on your door. Try not to be in the shower.”
He chuckled. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and went to her room. He remained standing in the corridor for a few minutes.
24
They came, they saw, they conquered—their jet lag. But hardly anything else. Their focus narrowed surprisingly, cutting out all of New York, targeted at two computers on a desk.
Sure enough, there was a gigantic amount of material, thousands of pages with impressive detail that extended to ten-page interviews with truly unimportant people, like those who had found bodies and neighbors of neighbors; pedantically scientific comparisons with earlier and contemporary serial killers; immensely elaborate maps of the crime scenes, sociopolitical analyses by university professors, autopsy reports that made note of the victims’ incipient gum problems and developing kidney stones, extremely carefully executed crime-scene investigations, and Ray Larner’s laboriously compiled description of Commando Cool’s actions in the Southeast Asian jungles.
It probably wasn’t the right place to start, but Hjelm picked the last item. If Larner had gotten hold of the truth, which was in no way certain, President Nixon had created Commando Cool by direct order, after he received information about the steadfastness of the NLF soldiers who had been captured in the field; they tended to die before they had time to talk. What was needed was a small, secret, active-service, mobile group of torturers with combat experience, even if the word torturer was, of course, never mentioned. The task of creating it went to military counterintelligence—and here Larner had placed quite a few question marks—which collected eight top men, each one younger than the last, and forced the operation into existence. It was in constant use during the final stages of the war. Where the pincers came from was uncertain, and Hjelm read “CIA” between Larner’s lines.
He opened the top-secret file about the pincers. There they were, in black and white: to the left a photograph of Commando Cool’s vocal cord pincers; to the right a sketched reconstruction of K’s pincers. Their function was the same in principle, but the differences were striking. K’s pincers were of an advanced, refined design, which seemed to have undergone some sort of industrial process of improvement. Scrupulous descriptions of their function followed: how the microwires moved through the tube with the help of miniature wheels, penetrated the throat, and fastened themselves around the vocal cords with small barbs, putting the vocal cords out of commission. A slight turn of one of the two small wheels then made it possible for whispers to force their way out. When they had forced their way out, all one had to do was turn the wheel again and end the job, in complete silence. The version on the right, K’s, was designed so that it was easier to make a puncture correctly. But Commando Cool had never used it during the war; it kept using the older model to the very end. The differences between the sets of pincers meant two things: one, that it was not at all certain that K was someone from Commando Cool; and two, that the horrible invention from the Vietnam War had been further developed. Why? And by whom? There were no hypotheses in Larner’s report.
After this came the second pincers, the pincers of pure torture, the one that twisted and pried at the cluster of nerves in the neck. This one had changed, too; someone had located new points on the nerves that were capable of increasing the pain even more, thus making the pincers even more effective. Here, too, the file provided a scrupulous description of the exact progression of pain, how it shot down to the back and shoulders and then up into the brain itself, resulting in explosive attacks.
The point was that the same pincers had been used in the first and second waves; they weren’t just identical models—certain characteristics of the wound formation indicated that the exact same pincers were used, and this was invoked as justification for saying that the perpetrator was the same. K.
If the pincers were the result of an industrial improvement process, then many people must have been involved in the task of development, whether it was military counterintelligence or the CIA or something else. But at this very point, where a considerable number of further suspects could have been sifted out, Larner had hit a wall of silence. Had he and the hacker, Andrews, invented Balls because he suspected that there actually was a Balls, a secret commander who would have been promoted all the way up into the Pentagon to effectively choke off all access to information? How had Larner obtained the information about the members of Commando Cool when he hadn’t gotten anything else?
He called Larner and asked.
“All that was a strange process,” Larner answered on the phone. “It took a lot of bribes and string pulling and veiled threats. After running into every wall imaginable, I worked my way to an anonymous official who, for several thousand dollars, copied the entire top-secret file on Commando Cool for me. Everything ought to have been there, but the only thing it contained was a list of the group members. The military just didn’t have the rest o
f it.”
“Was that when you started thinking CIA?”
Larner chuckled. “I guess I had been thinking that the whole time,” he said, and hung up.
Kerstin pulled up the list of victims and printed it out. The macabre inventory contained the sparsest amount of information imaginable: name, race, age, job, place of residence, site of discovery, and approximate time of death.
1) Michael Spender, white, 46, civil engineer at Macintosh, resident of Louisville, found in NW Kentucky, died around September 5, 1978.
2) Unidentified white male, 45–50 years of age, found in S Kentucky, died in early November 1978.
3) Unidentified white male, approximately 60, found in E Kentucky, died around March 14, 1979.
4) Yin Li-Tang, Taiwanese citizen, 28, resident of Lexington, biologist at University of Kentucky in Lexington, found on campus, died on May 9, 1979.
5) Robin Marsh-Eliot, white, 44, resident of Washington, D.C., foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, found in Cincinnati, Ohio, died in June or July 1979.
6) Unidentified white female, about 35, found in S Kentucky, died around September 3, 1979.
7) Unidentified white male, about 55 years of age, found in S Illinois, died between January and March 1980.
8) Unidentified Indian male, about 30, found in SW Tennessee, died between March 13 and 15, 1980.
9) Andrew Schultz, white, 36, resident of New York, pilot for Lufthansa, found in E Kentucky, died October 1980.
10) Unidentified white male, about 65, found in Kansas City, died December 1980.
11) Atle Gundersen, white, Norwegian citizen, 48, resident of Los Angeles, nuclear physicist at UCLA, found in SW West Virginia, died May 28, 1981.
12) Unidentified white male, 50-55, found in Frankfort, Kentucky, died August 1981.
13) Tony Barrett, white, 27, resident of Chicago, chemical engineer at Brabham Chemicals, Chicago, found in SW Kentucky, died between August 24 and 27, 1981.
14) Unidentified white male, 30–35, found in N Kentucky, died in October or November 1981.
15) Unidentified white male, 55–60, found in S Indiana, died January 1982.
