Europa Blues (45 page)

Just a few seconds later, he was dead.

Should Anton Eriksson really be allowed to ruin his own child’s life too? Posthumously?

‘Like hell,’ said Kerstin, doing up her seat belt.

‘What about the truth?’ Paul asked, doing the same.

‘Enough’s enough.’

Paul Hjelm laughed, turned the ignition key and swung out onto Bofinksvägen.

Anton Eriksson could remain the man he had spent half his life believing he was. Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman.

The Nobel Prize candidate.

Hopefully he had, somehow, reconciled with his falsified life before he died.

Paul Hjelm accelerated and turned up the volume.

It was how they felt. Exactly how.

Kind of Blue.

AND THEN THE
thing he had only dreamt of happened.

She came to visit him. ‘A ray of sunshine,’ as Anja said later that evening.

She just turned up. Arto was sitting on the veranda, slurping Vin Santo through a straw and enjoying life, and Anja went to open the door.

She came out onto the veranda and said: ‘It’s your colleague from the Italian police.’

Could it be Marconi? he wondered. They had already said goodbye.

He turned round and there she was.

She looked just like she had in Weimar. Slightly nervous and clutching a little handbag tightly in her hands.

‘Herr Söderstadt,’ she said cautiously.

His jaw dropped. It really was her.

It was Magda Kouzmin.

It was Magda Sheinkman.

It was Elena Basedow.

He couldn’t help but laugh, only for a short, short moment.

She didn’t look so violently homicidal. Erinye from 9 until 5.

He asked her to sit down. She thanked him and did so. He didn’t know where to begin and apparently nor did she. They sat in silence instead, watching the children run around, their heads bobbing like chess pieces out there among the greenery. Five white-haired and now four black-haired heads. Their group of friends was slowly but surely growing.

‘I admire you,’ she said. ‘You’re living. I’m something else.’

‘My mother’s uncle murdered your grandfather,’ said Arto Söderstedt.

There were opening lines and then there were opening lines …

She turned to him and smiled.

‘I guessed he was a relative.’

‘He only died recently. I inherited his money. All this, it’s a false paradise. It’s your money. And many, many others’. I still don’t know whether I should tell the world that Pertti Lindrot, the war hero, was a real bastard. I don’t know – should I sacrifice my children’s happiness for that?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Pertti Lindrot?’

‘Yes. From Finland.’

‘The third man,’ she nodded. ‘We never managed to identify him. It was impossible. Eventually I found out that there was, at least, a picture of him and that Herschel had it in Weimar. I went there and slept with him and copied the photo. Right after that, he asked me to pick up the spitting image of a man I’d just seen in a sixty-year-old photo from the railway station. It was a bit odd.’

‘I can understand that,’ said Söderstedt. ‘He drank himself to death. Slowly but surely. That’s the redeeming part of his existence.’

‘Maybe,’ Magda Kouzmin said after a moment. ‘I made sure to check the birthmark on his neck, by the way.’

‘How did you get into the palace?’

‘Same way you did. One after another, nice and calmly. Just a few hours earlier. They had no idea. They were waiting for you, not for us. They’d been following you. They were on to you the entire time.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We were watching them.’

‘So they were following me and you were following them?’

‘Yes. What I want to know is: how did you identify me?’

He looked at her. Was she here on business after all? That didn’t feel good.

She could immediately see it in his face.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not my intention to snoop. All I really wanted to ask for was my grandfather’s diary.’

‘It should be yours,’ said Söderstedt. ‘But I only have a copy. You can have it.’

‘Thank you.’

And then he told her. Against his better judgement, he told her.

‘I found you through your father. That was when I understood the scope of what you’d been through.’

‘My fate is hardly unique,’ she said. ‘It’s … European.’

He chuckled bitterly and said: ‘My turn to get technical. How did you find out about the method? What made you seek out the research group in Weimar?’

‘The Ghiottone took over our brothel in Odessa. That was back when Marco di Spinelli still left his palace. He visited us. He wanted to “test the girls”, he said. He seemed to like me a lot, because he started boasting about his disgusting war crimes in the throes of passion. That was always when he was horniest. He mentioned Weimar one day. There and then, I decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. That was how it all started. Taking out di Spinelli, that was the plan. And the method he described sounded good. About that time, we were constantly being abused by his sleazy henchman, Artemij Tolkatjenko, so once we’d made up our minds, it made sense to start with him. Wherever he was. It turned out he’d gone to England. Manchester. And then we just started seeking out other horrible pimps, that was all. We were always on the way to Marco di Spinelli though.’

‘So is it over now? The Erinyes will become Eumenides?’

‘We’ll see,’ Magda said, smiling shyly. ‘Once we left Odessa and got on top of the drugs, I went to Weimar to see what he’d been doing there during the war. It was all so secretive, but eventually – using fake grades – I ended up at the Pain Centre, helping out with all the crappy jobs they had. I realised that was where he’d been. And while I was there, I kept looking. I was often alone there at nights. Eventually, I found one of those wires and I started to understand how it worked. I also found some papers from an archive. It was a hell of a shock. The name Leonard Sheinkman was mentioned in connection to some diary. It said that he was dead and that the so-called “Swede” had taken care of his diary. I realised he was my real grandfather. Dad had told me his name was Sheinkman when he was little and that his father had been taken away from Buchenwald. I burnt the paper and memorised it all. The memories are all I have. What I work with. I found a file about my dad too, later on – just a couple of loose sheets. There were some notes about a ferry headed for Stockholm, and in the phone directory for Stockholm I found a Leonard Sheinkman. My grandfather’s name. I realised it must be the so-called “Swede”. He was pretending to be my grandfather. And he had killed my father. Both my dad and my grandpa. The same man had killed them both.’

‘You hung him above your father’s grave. He was on his way there.’

‘Oh, I didn’t know that,’ Magda said, looking genuinely surprised. ‘He’d been going around on the metro for a few days, as though he was on the way somewhere. He was probably catching up with himself and his crimes.’

‘Speaking of the metro,’ said Arto Söderstedt. ‘You said you’d only killed serious criminals, murderers and people who’ve abused women. Those three thugs in Palazzo Riguardo were also serious criminals, and you knew that in advance?’

‘Yes.’

‘But what about the metro in Stockholm? Odenplan? The person who stole your phone, he was just an immigrant. His name was Hamid al-Jabiri. Did he deserve to be ripped to shreds?’

‘No,’ Magda said unhappily. ‘That just happened.’

‘Adrenalin?’

‘Probably.’

‘Can’t you see this is all starting to get out of control? Soon, the violence will be an intrinsic value. Soon, you’ll be just as speed-blind as the Baader–Meinhof or ETA or the IRA. Everyone will be an enemy. Everyone but you will be worthy of death.’

Söderstedt paused and placed his hand on Magda’s. He really was trying to express himself clearly. Lives might depend on it.

‘Stop this now,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for it any more. You got di Spinelli. Everyone involved in your grandfather’s death is gone. You saved my life and I’m begging you now: stop this. It’s dragging us into some other kind of society, and both that society and its opponents are becoming increasingly undemocratic. That’s all that will end up happening. The only thing you’re really killing is democracy. It’s fragile and it’s important. Despite everything. So stop it now.’

Arto Söderstedt felt like Athena in Aeschylus’
Oresteia
.

Eventually, the leader of the Erinyes replied: ‘Lo, I desist from wrath, appeased by thee.’ And the Erinyes became Eumenides.

But that was poetry.

This was something else.

‘I don’t think it’s possible any more,’ Magda replied with a faint smile. ‘Even if I wanted to.’

He nodded.

‘I tried, anyway,’ he said.

They sat for a moment longer. The wall between them had risen once more.

‘I’ll get the diary,’ he said, getting to his feet.

Magda waited on the veranda. She looked out over the paradisiacal landscape, and no one, absolutely no one in the world, could have known what she was thinking.

He came back and handed her the diary. They parted without a word. He watched as she wandered down the narrow, steep, crooked road to Greve.

Chianti was showing its best side. The sun was playing on her back and made her black clothes almost glow. She disappeared behind the crest of the hill like a piece of glowing coal.

The shadow of her seemed to linger long after she had gone.

It would probably never disappear.

Söderstedt stood there bathed in the scent of nineteen different varieties of basil. A warm wind gently caressed his cheek. The winemakers were pacing slowly back and forth along their vines on the sun-drenched hills. The children were running around increasingly wildly, and black could no longer be distinguished from white, white no longer from black; the clamour of their voices rose in a paean to the luminous wisps of cloud hanging in the clear blue sky.

Everything was wonderful. And everything was false.

He was standing on top of bodies in order to see Paradise.

And he wasn’t alone. He was an entire continent.

Anja appeared from her basil-scented landscape like a misplaced marrow. She walked over to him on the veranda and took a sip of his Vin Santo.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, stroking her stomach.

They stood there for a moment.

Eventually, he said: ‘How’s the little rascal doing?’

Anja laughed and hit him with her gardening gloves.

‘What is it with you?’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m
not
pregnant.’

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Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,

Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at
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Copyright © Arne Dahl 2001

English translation copyright © Alice Menzies 2015

Arne Dahl has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Harvill Secker in 2015

First published in Sweden by Bra Böcker AB, a division of Albert Bonniers Forlag, Stockholm in 2001

www.vintage-books.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library