Misterioso (2 page)

Hjelm felt completely empty. That was why he had stepped into his colleague’s fleeting terror—to escape from himself for a moment.

The day had started in the worst imaginable way. The bedroom was utterly suffocating; the early spring sun had played over the blinds for a while, trapping the stuffiness. With a stiff, persistent morning erection, he had crept closer to Cilla, who as unobtrusively as possible had wriggled in the opposite direction. He didn’t notice, refused to notice, crept closer with his stubborn, stifled urgency. And she slipped away, inch by inch, until she suddenly got too close to the edge of the bed and fell to the floor.

He bolted upright, sitting up in bed wide awake, his erection abruptly lost. She quietly got up off the floor, shaking her head, wordless with fury. She stuck her hand into her panties and fished out a pad soaked with blood, holding it out toward him. He gave a slight grimace that was both apologetic and filled with disgust. Then they noticed that Danne was standing in the doorway, a look of obvious horror on his pimply fourteen-year-old face. He ran off. They heard a key turn, and Public Enemy started rapping full blast.

They exchanged looks. Suddenly they were reunited by a bewildered sense of guilt. Cilla dashed out of the room, but knocking on Danne’s door was pointless.

Then they were sitting at the breakfast table.

Tova and Danne had left for school. Danne hadn’t eaten any breakfast, hadn’t uttered a word, hadn’t exchanged a glance with any of them. With her back to Paul, Cilla said, looking at the sparrows on the bird feeder outside the window of their row
house in Norsborg, “You’ve witnessed two births. Why the hell are you still disgusted by a woman’s bodily functions?”

He felt completely empty. The car passed the Slagsta allotment gardens on the right and the Brunna School on the left. It made a sharp left turn down toward Hallunda Square; for a moment he had Ernstsson in his lap. They exchanged tired glances and watched as the truncated but crowded stretches of Linvägen, Kornvägen, Hampvägen, and Havrevägen flew past outside the window. The street names—
flax, grain, hemp, oats
—were like a textbook on agronomy. Everywhere loomed the antithesis of the agrarian society, the brutally unimaginative facades of the identical tall apartment buildings from the sixties and seventies.
A breeding ground
, thought Hjelm without understanding what he meant. The extinct voices of a peasant society echoed through him like ghosts.

Over by the square three police cars were parked with their doors wide open. Behind a couple of the doors crouched uniformed officers with their weapons drawn. They were pointed in all different directions. The rest of the cops were running around, shooing away curious bystanders, baby buggies, and dog owners.

Hjelm and Ernstsson pulled up alongside the others. The officers were helping with what would later be called “the evacuation of the area.” Hjelm was still sitting halfway inside the vehicle while Ernstsson got out and went over to the next car. Squeezing out of it came the disheveled figure of Johan Bringman, who stretched his creaky back.

“The immigration office,” he managed to say in the middle of his stretching. “Three hostages.”

“Okay, what do we know?” asked Ernstsson, peering down from his towering height at Bringman’s hunched form and unbuttoning his leather jacket in the late winter sun.

“Shotgun, third floor. The majority of the building has been cleared. We’re waiting for the hostage negotiators.”

“From headquarters at Kungsholmen?” said Hjelm from inside the car. “That’ll take awhile. Have you seen the traffic on the E4?”

“Where’s Bruun?” said Ernstsson.

Bringman shook his head. “No idea. Maybe he’s waiting for the top brass to arrive. In any case, it was a clerk from the office who managed to get out. Come on out, Johanna. Over here. This is Johanna Nilsson. She works inside the building.”

A blond woman in her forties got out of the police car and went to stand next to Ernstsson. She held one hand on her forehead and the other to her lips, chewing on one fingernail, then another.

Ernstsson attempted to comfort her by placing his hand on her shoulder and said in his most reassuring voice, “Try and take it easy. We’re going to resolve this situation. Do you know who he is?”

“His name is Dritëro Frakulla,” said Johanna. Her voice broke but her words were firm. “A Kosovar Albanian. His family has been here a long time, and now they’ve been sucked into the general wave of deportation. They thought everything was fine and were just waiting for their citizenship. Then all of a sudden they were informed of the opposite. I assume that’s when things went wrong. The rug was pulled out from under them. I’ve seen it so many times before.”

“Do you know him?”

“Know him? For God’s sake, he’s my friend! It was my case. I know his children, his wife, even his freaking cats. I’m probably the one he’s after. He’s a timid man—he’d never hurt a fly. But I lied to him.” She raised her voice. “Without knowing it, I was lying to him the whole goddamned time! The rules kept changing
and changing and changing. How the hell are we supposed to do our job when everything we say gets turned into lies?”

Hjelm got wearily to his feet. He took off his heavy denim jacket with the sheepskin collar, unfastened his shoulder holster, and tossed it inside the car. He stuck his service revolver into his waistband behind his back and put his jacket on again.

He felt empty.

“What the hell are you doing?” said Svante Ernstsson and Johan Bringman in unison.

“I’m going in.”

“The hostage team will be here any minute, for fuck’s sake!” Ernstsson shouted at Hjelm as he crossed Tomtbergavägen. He ran after him and grabbed his arm. “Wait, Paul. Don’t do anything stupid. It’s not necessary. Leave it to the experts.”

He met Hjelm’s gaze, saw the blank look of resolve, and let go of his arm.

We know each other too well
, he thought, and nodded.

Hjelm slowly made his way up the stairs to the immigration office. He saw nothing, heard nothing. The air was stifling in the dreary, deserted building. Everything was concrete. Concrete with thick, plastic-like paint that seemed gray-tinged no matter what color it was. The walls were covered with chips of flecking paint like halfhearted decorations. A strange heat, shimmering as if in the desert, sucked up the stench of urine, sweat, and alcohol.
This is how Sweden smells
, Hjelm thought as he reached the third floor.

It was the mid-1990s.

He made his way cautiously down the empty, dismal government corridor until he was standing outside the closed door. He took a deep breath and shouted, “Frakulla!”

It was very, very quiet. Not wanting to give himself time to think, he went on.

“My name is Paul Hjelm, and I’m a police officer. I’m alone and unarmed. I just want to talk to you.”

A faint rustling sound could be heard behind the door. Then a husky, barely audible voice said, “Come in.”

Hjelm took another deep breath and opened the door.

Sitting on the floor of the office were two women and a man with their hands on their heads. Standing very close to them, against the windowless wall, was a short, dark man in a brown suit, complete with vest, tie, and shotgun. The latter was pointed straight at Hjelm’s nose.

He closed the door behind him and raised his hands in the air.

“I know what’s happened to you, Frakulla,” he said calmly. “We need to resolve this situation so nobody gets hurt. If you surrender now, you can still appeal the decision; otherwise it’s going to be prison and then deportation for you. Look, I’m unarmed.” He carefully shrugged out of his jean jacket and dropped it to the floor.

Dritëro Frakulla was blinking rapidly. He aimed the gun alternately at Hjelm and at the three civil servants on the floor.

Don’t ask me to turn around
, thought Hjelm.
Keep talking, keep talking. Focus on showing him sympathy. Use words that’ll make him think. Distract his attention
.

“Think about your family,” he managed. “What will your children do without you to support them? What about your wife—does she work? What kind of job will she be able to get, Frakulla? What sort of qualifications does she have?”

The shotgun was now aimed at him; that was what he wanted.

Frakulla suddenly spoke, almost as if he were reciting the words, in clear Swedish: “The worse crimes I commit, the longer we’ll be able to stay in this country. They won’t send my family away without me. I’m sacrificing myself for their sake.”

“You’re wrong, Frakulla. Your family will be deported immediately, forced to return to the Serbs without any means of defending themselves. What do you think the Serbs will do with a woman and a couple of preschool kids that tried to flee from them? And what do you think will happen to you if you’re charged with murdering a cop, an unarmed cop?”

For a second the man lowered the shotgun an inch or two, looking utterly confused. That was enough for Hjelm. He reached back to fumble at his waistband, pulled out his service revolver, and fired one shot.

A voice was silenced inside him:
“Why the hell are you still disgusted by a woman’s bodily functions?”

For a moment that seemed lifted out of time, everything was absolutely still. Frakulla held the shotgun in a tight grip. His inscrutable eyes bored straight into Hjelm’s. Anything could happen.

“Ai,” said Dritëro Frakulla, dropped the gun, and toppled forward.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction
, thought Hjelm, and felt sick.

The male civil servant grabbed the shotgun and pressed the muzzle hard against Frakulla’s head. A patch of blood was growing larger under the man’s right shoulder.

“Drop the weapon, you fuck!” yelled Hjelm, and vomited.

At first it’s only the piano’s bizarre little strolls up and down the keys, accompanied by a high-hat and maybe the faint clash of a cymbal, possibly the sweep of the brushes on the snare drum as
well. Occasionally the fingers digress a bit from the marked path of their climb, into a light, bluesy feeling, but without breaking the choppy rhythm of the strutting two-four beat. Then a slight pause, the saxophone joins the same riff, and everything changes. Now the bass comes in, calmly walking up and down. The sax takes over, and the piano scatters sporadic comping chords in the background, broken by a few ramblings behind the apparently indolent improvisations of the sax.

He presses the tweezers into the hole, tugging and tugging.

The saxophone chirps with slight dissonance, then instantly falls back into the melodic theme. The piano goes silent; it’s so quiet that the audience can be heard in the background.

The tweezers pull out what they’ve been looking for.

The sax man says “Yeah” a couple of times, in between a couple of rambles. The audience says “Yeah.” Long drawn-out notes. The piano is still absent. Scattered applause.

Then the piano returns and takes over. It meanders as before, making successive detours, rumbles, ever freer trills. Just the piano, bass, and drums.

He presses the tweezers into the second hole. This time it’s easier. He drops both lumps into his pocket. He sits down on the sofa.

The wanderings of the piano have returned to their starting point. Now the bass is gone. Then it comes back in, along with the sax. All four now, in a veiled promenade. Then the applause. Yeah.

He presses the remote. A vast silence ensues.

He gets up cautiously. Stands for a moment in the big room. High over his head dust motes circulate in the nonexistent draft around the crystal chandelier. The dull metal on the streamlined shape of the stereo reflects nothing of the faint light: Bang & Olufsen.

Bang, bang
, he thinks.
Olufsen
, he thinks. Then he stops thinking.

He runs his gloved hand lightly over the shiny leather surface of the sofa before he allows himself to tread tentatively across the pleasantly creaking parquet floor. He avoids the huge Pakistani carpet, hand-knotted over a month’s time by the slave labor of Pakistani children, and goes out into the corridor. He opens the door and steps out onto the terrace, stopping for a moment, close to the hammock.

He fills his lungs with the tranquil, chilly air of the spring night, letting his eyes rest on the rows of apple trees: Astrakhans and Åkerös, Ingrid Maries and Lobos, Transparante blanches and Kanikers. Each tree is labeled with a little sign; he noticed that on his way in. So far the apples can be found only on the signs, showy, brilliantly hued, long before any blossoms have even appeared. Flat, surrogate apples.

He would like to believe that it’s crickets that he hears; otherwise it’s inside his head.
Sonic bang
, he thinks.
And Olufsen
, he thinks.

Although it wasn’t a real bang, of course.

Leaving the terrace, he closes the door behind him, goes back down the long corridor, and returns to the enormous living room. Once again he avoids the red-flamed frescos of the hand-knotted carpet, goes over to the stereo, and presses the eject button. In a vaguely elliptical trajectory, the cassette tape gently rises out of the tape deck. He plucks it out and puts it in his pocket. He turns off the stereo.

He looks around the room.
What an atmosphere
, he thinks. Even the dust motes seem custom-made to complement the crystal chandelier, as they elegantly swirl around it.

In his mind’s eye he sees a list. In his mind he checks off each item.

Kuno
, he thinks, laughing.
Isn’t that the name of a party game?

He leaves the living room by a slightly different route. A teak table and four matching, high-backed chairs stand on another
hand-knotted rug; he imagines that it’s Persian. It is predominantly beige, in contrast to the red Pakistani carpet.

Although right now they’re very similar.

Close to the table he has to step over what is coloring the Persian rug red. Then he lifts his legs to step over someone else’s.

Out in the garden a drowsy full moon peeks from behind its fluffy cloud cover, as a veiled fairylike dance skims the bare apple trees.