Europa Blues (44 page)

He need not have worried.

He opened the lid a fraction of an inch. He could see the outlines of an oven and a stove. Otherwise, nothing.

Suddenly, the lid was torn open and the barrel of a high-calibre gun was jammed into his mouth. The light in the kitchenette came on, blinding him. He was hauled up out of the chute and thrown down to the floor.

‘New cologne?’ Marco di Spinelli asked.

Someone kicked Söderstedt in the stomach before lifting him up by his hair and throwing him onto a chair. The three bodyguards were standing in a ring around him. One of them shoved his high-calibre pistol into Söderstedt’s mouth once more. He thought: Then, back then, when the phone rang in that restaurant on Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence, back then everything had been possible. Then, back then, when the wine had been flowing and he was enjoying the spring breeze as he looked out over the Arno and the whole of Florence was like a man-made paradise in front of him, right then it would have been possible to ignore the phone.

If he had done that, his paradise would still be intact.

A bit boring, perhaps, but boring in a paradisiacal way.

The pistol was yanked out of his mouth. Against the wall behind the bodyguards, Marco di Spinelli was standing, straight-backed. Ninety-two years old and still convinced of the superiority of his genes.

‘The bag of rubbish was a nice touch, wasn’t it?’ he said, wrinkling his nose. ‘You really do not smell good, Signor Sadestatt.’

One of the bodyguards took Söderstedt’s little pistol and handed it over to di Spinelli, who looked at it with interest.

‘One of those guns the police tend to use when they’re avoiding looking like they’re policemen. For some reason, they’re always the same.’ He handed the gun back to the bodyguard and said, nonchalantly: ‘I suppose it was in the envelope.’

Arto Söderstedt closed his eyes and understood. He could feel the blood running from his mouth and wondered how many teeth he was missing.

And he realised, with a chilling clarity, that he would never get to meet his new baby.

‘You must understand,’ di Spinelli said, ‘that we’ve been filming that irritatingly incorruptible Marconi for years. We followed you to Odessa and to Leipzig and to Weimar and back. You might have hurt yourself.’

‘Hans von Heilberg,’ Söderstedt hissed.

‘Yes, yes,’ di Spinelli replied disinterestedly. ‘But Marconi was right that you did manage to surprise me on your first visit. I’d seen the film from Marconi’s office, of course, but you were sitting with your back to the camera so I hadn’t seen your face. It surprised me. You also seemed unusually mediocre. Then I realised it was a mask. You weren’t unusually mediocre, just mediocre. In a way, that was worse.’

‘And the Erinyes?’ Söderstedt panted.

‘Eastern European competition,’ di Spinelli replied with a shrug. ‘We have plenty of that these days, but it isn’t especially difficult for us to deal with. We’ll pick them up soon enough. They usually lose patience. But there’s one matter from earlier that we need to straighten out, Signor Sadestatt.’

‘How is it I’m so similar to Pertti Lindrot, the SS doctor from the Pain Centre in Weimar?’

‘Yes, how?’

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ Söderstedt said. ‘They’re dead, both of them. Pertti Lindrot devoted his life to drinking himself stupid. Anton Eriksson became a Jewish professor and met his end hanging upside down with a metal nail in his brain.’

‘Well, what do you know,’ said di Spinelli. ‘But you haven’t answered the question.’

‘I have no intention of doing so either,’ Söderstedt replied.

Suddenly, he felt a kind of shifting presence in the palace. He grinned.

‘In that case, it’s time to relive some old memories,’ Hans von Heilberg said, picking up a small box, not dissimilar to the kind you would keep expensive old jewellery in. ‘Of great value to the right collector,’ he said, removing a long, thin, sharp metal nail from the box. He bent it slightly, like a master fencer bends his rapier before each bout.

Then, suddenly, his three gorillas died.

The nail pinged back and Marco di Spinelli looked down at his three dead lumps of meat in surprise.

Something rushed by the door out towards the love nest. Like an illusion. It was completely empty back there. All he had noticed was a faint movement.

‘You move quickly, Magda,’ Söderstedt said into the nothingness.

The room remained silent and empty. Marco di Spinelli stared towards the mute darkness in the room where, for years, he had received prostitutes. Perhaps there was a glimmer of fear in his steely eyes. He grabbed one of his gorillas’ pistols and crept slowly over towards the love nest. He disappeared round the corner.

Söderstedt heard him.

He heard him die.

He didn’t scream, that would have been beneath him, but he gave out a wheeze, and that wheeze declared that he had lived too long.

Much too long.

He was dangling from the crystal chandelier in his exquisite office, hanging there like a modern work of art alongside Leonardo and Piero della Francesca’s masterpieces and the sixteenth-century tapestries. The faint moonlight was shining in through the window by which the Marquis of Perduto had composed his famous sonnets to Amelia, the girl he had met at the age of eight and never quite managed to forget.

Arto Söderstedt stood alongside him. The little pistol hung from his hand in the same way as Marco di Spinelli hung from his perfect chandelier. Both dangled. There was nothing for Söderstedt to aim his gun at. The room was empty. Elsewhere in the palace, the guards sat playing cards. They were blissfully unaware they were now unemployed.

He squatted down to look at Hans von Heilberg’s face. Just like the way in which the man himself had looked at the hundreds of victims whose dental gold had formed the basis of his financial activities in Milan. Activities which, in turn, laid the basis for his criminal empire.

Everything went hand in hand.

Hans von Heilberg’s shirt collar had been ripped back. A purple, rhombus-shaped birthmark shone dark against his pale skin.

From his temple, a long, sharp, stiff nail. The steely look in his eyes had been obliterated by the pain.

Time was slowly righting itself once more.

‘Are you there, Magda?’ Söderstedt asked, looking at di Spinelli’s glassy, lifeless eyes.

A faint shifting behind his back confirmed that she was.

They all were.

But when he turned round, he couldn’t see a soul.

He smiled.

And then he said, to the room, straight into the incomprehensible: ‘Thank you.’

IT WAS HIGH
summer in Stockholm, the sun low in the unusually deep blue sky. And yet this time, it wasn’t at all as though an opera scenographer had tried to imitate nature.

It may not quite have been nature, but at least it was more like nature than before.

Than it had been a few weeks before.

Nature is the terribly awful truth.

The last time Paul Hjelm had been on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö, he had enjoyed a long, deep and open-hearted conversation with Leonard Sheinkman’s son. Though in actual fact, Leonard Sheinkman’s only son had died, right there, twenty years earlier. The man he had spoken to wasn’t Leonard Sheinkman’s son at all. He was the mass murderer and Nazi Anton Eriksson’s son. He was a Jewish man named Harald Sheinkman who now needed to be brought up to date about the whole sorry state of affairs.

About the fact his father was a Nazi, not a Jew.

About the fact his father was an executioner, not a victim.

About the fact his father hadn’t written the yellowed pages of that diary, but stolen it and used it to build a background for himself.

About the fact his father had managed to cause the worst pain imaginable by experimenting on guinea pig after guinea pig in a nightmare cellar in Weimar.

About the fact his father had murdered women and children.

How far did the limits of atonement really stretch?

The Pain Centre.

Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
streamed through the old Audi. That was precisely how Paul Hjelm felt.

Kind of Blue.

He said: ‘What is it you’re going through?’

Kerstin Holm turned to look at him.

Her own crisis had stopped short. The Erinyes were dominating her thoughts now. They didn’t leave room for much else.

They dealt out justice, their very own kind of justice. One which consisted of revenge – no more, no less. They took revenge on behalf of unavenged injustices.

So what exactly distinguished them from state-sanctioned death penalties?

She didn’t know. At times, they seemed almost fascistic. At times, rightful avengers. Sometimes, they were nothing more than terrorists. Sometimes, they were repressed but utterly vital mythical forces.

One thing was clear: the Erinyes would never become Eumenides. They would never allow themselves to be neutralised by the lightweight society in which they lived.

Because that was what life in the West was – lightweight: easily lived, easily digested, easily fucked. The unbearable lightness of being. An all-American
Existence Light
. Filled with chemical sweetener that killed infinitely more quickly than real sugar ever did.

That was the essence of her crisis. Her … metamorphosis. Even if the word did seem slightly grand. Pretentious, even – and if there was one thing no one wanted to be, it was pretentious. That was where everyone drew the line.

The thing she was searching for was the free zone, that place where the primitive forces had free rein to bubble away undisturbed. That bubble we never fail to pop before it gets too big. The one she could feel the virtual presence of every time she sang with the choir, allowing her voice to rise up towards the high vaulted ceilings and letting the choir’s tones surround her like a warm, comforting embrace. Religious? Mmm. But without a sense of the holy, our sense of the
unholy
also withers away. And we need to retain that. Otherwise we die.

That was roughly how it was. But how best to phrase it?

Maybe something like this:

‘It’s a bit tricky to explain. But don’t worry. I’m just brooding, causing myself grief.’

Paul Hjelm chuckled. ‘Story of my life,’ he said.

They were silent for a moment. The distance between them wasn’t especially big. There were no watertight doors keeping them apart. It was all leaking through. No, it wasn’t possible to understand someone else completely. But what about yourself?

So what
, as Miles Davis was playing.

The image in each of their minds was, at least, the same. Hultin’s whiteboard. First, five names. At the bottom, the two who had fled the Ghiottone and Odessa together with Magda in August 1997. Above, three upper-case names in red: Magda Kouzmin, Magda Sheinkman, Elena Basenow. Three names, one woman. Alongside it, an e-fit image put together by Arto Söderstedt and Ernst Herschel. Arto had, in the strictest confidence, told them he suspected Herschel would find it easier to describe her vagina than he did her face, but they managed to put a picture together regardless. A picture of a face and nothing else. They had shown it to Adib Tamir too, and he had confirmed it. That was what she looked like, the bitch who cut Hamid in two.

Arto Söderstedt was fine. He was missing four teeth, wearing peculiar-looking braces and only able to sip Vin Santo through a straw. He was also talking quite strangely. But otherwise, he seemed happier than ever.

It looked doubtful he would ever come home again.

Next to the e-fit of Magda were four photographs, or rather three more e-fits and one proper photograph. They still had just one of the other Erinyes on film, and that was the woman with the mobile phone in Gdynia. Two were the e-fits that Jadwiga from the M/S
Stena Europe
had composed, and the third had been put together by a salesman from a superstore in Bromma to which Jorge, with great finesse, had managed to trace the red-and-purple-striped rope. The salesman could remember selling it to a woman dressed in black. He had assumed she was an Eastern European working girl and started hitting on her. She had paid in the form of 120 kronor and a kick to the groin. That was why he remembered her so well, and she was none of the four they knew of. That meant she was likely one of those who had taken part in the hangings in Skansen and Södra Begravningsplatsen. In Palazzo Riguardo too, in all probability.

Suddenly, the kick to the groin seemed almost gentle. Practically a caress.

There they hung in any case, five sharp female faces with a slight Slavic look to them.

All unidentified apart from Magda Kouzmin.

Europe was now on the hunt for them, and it was all their fault.

The A-Unit’s fault.

Neither Paul nor Kerstin were quite sure it was a good thing.

This was a case where plenty of guilty parties had been identified but not a single one had been arrested. Time had somehow set itself right, though; it had caught up with itself. And Jan-Olov Hultin looked fit as a fiddle. Not a stroke in sight. No black hole in the space–time continuum. A newly found sense of clairvoyance, perhaps, but they could live with that. Even Hultin.

They had finally had a response from the phone company in Ukraine. The phone from Odenplan had, on a number of occasions, made calls to two different numbers in Milan. Sometimes they had been to Palazzo Riguardo, presumably threatening calls, and sometimes to a nearby hotel room, where it wasn’t entirely implausible to imagine a couple of the Erinyes sitting and waiting, mapping out di Spinelli’s entire life. Aside from that, a large number of calls to and from Slagsta. Nothing else of interest.

‘Should we go in then?’ Paul Hjelm asked. ‘Should we go in and ruin Harald Sheinkman’s life just as he’s starting to get back on his feet?’

It was their job.

They both looked up at the beautiful house on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö. Before them, they could see a man without a nose practically skipping up to the house, brushing the roses with his hands and breathing in the scents of the garden through the hole he had in the place of a nose, before reaching its handsome front door and saying to himself: ‘To think that Pappa did so well when I did so badly. But now, now my life’s wounds will heal. As soon as I’m reunited with Pappa, who I loved when we lived in Berlin, who comforted me every night in the terrible Buchenwald. Then I’ll return to Odessa and take Magda from that awful orphanage where everyone becomes an addict or a whore, and we’ll move here to beautiful Sweden, and finally become a proper family again.’