Misterioso (41 page)

“But then there was the cassette you left behind. Surely you could have grabbed it and taken it along, even without killing the daughter. But you left it. Why? It was your great source of inspiration. And then what happened? Was it unbearable without the music? Did it force you to look deep into your heart?

“And then the conversation with me, which you very deliberately sprinkled with the clues. And finally this. You knew all about Winge’s habits, you knew that he’d be coming out here with Anja. And you knew that you wouldn’t be able to kill Anja. You sat here as usual, waiting for your victim to arrive. Maybe they’d gone out for a walk, left their love nest and gone to a restaurant, and then you slipped inside. But this isn’t the usual living room. You knew very well that Winge wouldn’t be coming here alone. You set yourself up for this situation. It’s your own, possibly subconscious, but very intentional creation. You wanted to bring me in here. Why me? And why did you want this particular situation?”

Göran Andersson stared at him. Only now did Hjelm notice how tremendously tired the man looked. Tired of everything.

“There are so many reasons,” Andersson said. “All the strange connections that have landed me here. Coincidences piling up that I thought were fate. Maybe that’s what I still think. But without the music, the mystery disappeared. And you, you in particular, Paul Hjelm, were the final nail in the coffin. The empty apartment that I heard about turned out to be right next door to the police station in Fittja. Okay, that was to be expected; it was part of the overriding pattern. The fact that the hostage drama took place out there, at the very same time as my first murder, and that it stole all the media attention from me … that was also only natural. Everything was conspiring.

“But later, when it turned out that
you
had been out to my house in Algotsmåla and talked to Lena, that
you
were the one who was hunting me, then I realized that our fates were interlinked, yours and mine. I know that you were about to lose your job because of that hostage drama. I know that you, just like me a few months earlier, stood in your row house in Norsborg and looked at yourself in the mirror but saw no reflection. I know that you felt the ground being ripped out from under your feet. I know that you were dangling in midair and wishing death on the police top brass because they didn’t back you up but just hovered somewhere high over your head. Maybe you even thought about killing the whole lot of them.

“Don’t you understand how alike we are? We’re just two ordinary Swedes that time has left behind. Nothing we believed in exists anymore. Everything has changed, and we haven’t been able to keep up, Paul. We signed up for a static world, the most Swedish of all characteristics. With our mother’s milk we imbibed the idea that everything would always remain the same. We’re the paper that people reuse because they think it’s blank. And maybe it is. Completely blank.”

Göran Andersson stood up and went on.

“The next time you look at yourself in the mirror, it’ll be me that you see, Paul. In you I will live on.”

Paul Hjelm sat mutely on the bed. There was nothing to say. There was nothing he could possibly say.

“If you’ll excuse me,” said Göran Andersson, “I’ve got a dart game to finish.”

He took out of his pocket a measuring tape and a dart. He placed the dart on the table in front of him, and with the gun still aimed at Hjelm, he eased over to the two figures in the corner. From Alf Ruben Winge’s passive, corpulent body he measured a specific length, and then drew a mark on the floor a short distance from the chair. Then he sat down again, put the measuring tape on the table, and picked up the dart, weighing it in his hand.

“You know how to play five-oh-one,” he said. “You count backward from five-oh-one down to zero. When I hit that bull’s-eye in the bank in town, I only had the checkout left. I still do. And I’ve never left a game unfinished. Do you know what the checkout is?”

Hjelm didn’t answer. He just stared.

Andersson held up the dart. “You have to hit the right number inside the double ring in order to get down to zero. That’s what I’m going to do now. But the game doesn’t usually go on for four months.”

He stood up and went over to the mark on the floor.

“Ninety-three and three-quarters inches. The same distance that I measured in the living rooms.”

He raised the dart toward Hjelm. Hjelm merely watched. Anja Parikka stared wildly. Even Winge had opened his eyes. They were fixed on the dart.

“The same dart that I pulled out of the bull’s-eye back home
in Algotsmåla on February fifteenth,” he said. “It’s time for the checkout.”

He raised the dart, aimed, and hurled at the spare tire that was Alf Ruben Winge’s stomach. The dart stuck in his paunch. Winge’s eyes opened wide. Not a sound slipped out from under the tape.

“The double ring,” said Göran Andersson. “Checkout. The game is over. It was certainly a long one.”

He went over to Hjelm and crouched down a short distance from the bed. The gun was still aimed at Hjelm.

“When I play,” said Göran Andersson lightly, “I’m a very focused person. When the game is over, I’m very ordinary. The tension is released. I can go back to daily life with renewed energy.”

Hjelm still couldn’t get a sound across his lips.

“And daily life,” said Göran Andersson, “daily life involves dying. I’d like you to grab my body when I fall.”

He stuck the silencer into his mouth. Hjelm couldn’t move.
The hostage hero turned to stone
, he managed to think.

“Checkout,” Göran Andersson said thickly.

The shot was fired.

But the report was louder than it should have been.

Andersson fell forward. Hjelm caught his body. He thought the blood running over him was his own.

He looked up at the window above Anja and Winge. Shattered glass was everywhere. The shade had been pulverized. Jorge Chavez stuck his black head into the room.

“The shoulder,” he said.

“Ow!” said Göran Andersson.

Even Gunnar Nyberg was present. He was sitting in his usual place with his head wrapped in bandages and looking like the mummy in the old horror film. He really shouldn’t have been there.

But there they all sat, ready to say goodbye to each other and return to the police stations in Huddinge, Sundsvall, Göteborg, Västerås, Stockholm, and Nacka. It would be June in two days. Their summer was saved.

The mood was ambivalent. No one said a word.

Jan-Olov Hultin entered the room through his mysterious special door, this time leaving it open. They saw an ordinary bathroom inside.

The mystery was gone, but the mist still remained.

Hultin plopped a thick file onto the table, sat down, and set his reading glasses on his big nose.

“All right,” he said. “A brief summary of last night is in order. Göran Andersson is being treated in the hospital for his relatively minor shoulder wound. Alf Ruben Winge is being treated at the same hospital for an equally minor wound in his large intestine. Anja Parikka, not unexpectedly, was affected the most; she’s in intensive care, suffering from severe shock. We can only hope she’ll recover. What about you? Paul?”

Everyone exchanged glances, a bit surprised.

“I’m fine,” Hjelm said wearily. “The hostage expert has recovered.”

“Good,” said Hultin. “Tell us what happened, Jorge.”

“It was no big deal,” said Chavez. “I made my way over to the window to the left of the door, as Paul and I had agreed. But I couldn’t see a thing, so after a moment I slowly moved over
to the window where Arto said he’d seen a gap. I got there just as Andersson went over to Hjelm. So, following a well-known example, I shot him in the shoulder.”

“Quite against the rules,” Hultin said. He went over to the whiteboard and drew the last arrows. It was a powerful diagram that he’d managed to create, a complex, asymmetrical pattern. Every name, every place, every event from the long and intensive investigation had been recorded.

Hultin stood there for a moment, studying his work.

“The beauty of the abstract,” he said, and came back to the table. “And the filthiness of solid police work.”

He returned to what was solid.

“So,” he said, “at least we achieved a final symmetry. Jorge’s shot was fired before the stroke of twelve, so the case lasted for exactly two months.”

Söderstedt said in surprise, “That means the case was solved on the twenty-ninth of May, the anniversary of the Turks’ invasion of Constantinople in 1453, which is the date of the start of the new era.”

They all looked at him so balefully that he shrugged apologetically.

“Thanks for that,” Hultin remarked. “Well. One final question for those of you who live outside the city: are you ready to go home?”

No one replied.

“Do that, at any rate, and enjoy the summer. Then you’ll all be coming back here. If you want to. As Mörner and the head of the NCP and no doubt many others who want to bask in your glory will tell you, the A-Unit is going to be made a permanent entity, although of course not under that ridiculous name.”

The former A-Unit members gaped foolishly at one another.

“The following applies,” said Hultin. Adjusting the position of his reading glasses, he silently read an official memo and
shook his head. “I was planning to read Mörner’s memorandum to you, but I see that it’s unreadable. I’ll summarize instead. The A-Unit was, as you know, an experiment conducted by the NCP in order to avoid the idiocies that developed around the Palme murder case, with investigative groups that were too big, in constant flux, and full of wasted resources. Instead, a small, compact core group was put together; officers who were prepared to work their asses off were invested with great authority to circumvent the standard procedures with entrepreneurial measures, so to speak, enabling them to focus all their attention on what was essential. The experiment was regarded as, and here I reluctantly quote, ‘at the present moment and in consideration of the contexts which as such, according to the aforementioned memorandum, expedited the ideal resolution of the present case, apparently satisfactory.’ In other words, Mörner is damned pleased. The A-Unit will become a permanent entity within the NCP and will focus exclusively on the hardest cases. At the moment that means it will be dealing with ‘violent crimes of an international character.’ What do you say to that?”

“Have you got a nice downtown apartment for a wild Finn with five kids?” asked Söderstedt. “I’m getting really tired of puttering around in my garden back home.”

“There probably won’t be much time for puttering,” said Hultin. “Am I to interpret that as a Söderstedt
yes
?”

“Of course I’ll have to check with my family,” he added.

“Of course,” said Hultin. “All of you will have a couple of free months to check with your families and so on. We’ll meet again on the fourth of August. Until then, you’re on vacation, even though you’ll have to be available for the prosecutor in the run-up to the Göran Andersson case. The fact that Jorge spared his life is going to cost the government millions.”

Chavez grimaced.

Hultin went on, “Is there anyone here who wants to say right
off the bat that they’d rather not continue with the NCP? You know what the wise man said: ‘Once you’re in, you’ll never get out. Except in an appropriate coffin.’ Stamped NCP.”

Nobody spoke up. Hjelm smiled.

“So be it.” Hultin stacked his papers. “Have a wonderful summer. Provided that there’s still some left.”

They stood up hesitantly and trooped out. Hjelm remained at the table, more or less incapable of moving.

Hultin picked up the cloth to transform his whiteboard masterpiece into a little spot on the fabric. He hesitated for a moment and said without turning around, “Maybe you should memorize this outline and use it to replace the map of Sweden in your atlas.”

Hjelm studied the bewildering mishmash of arrows and squares and printed letters. There they all were. An insane and yet logical map of the mental fragments of a country. An unlikely constellation of connections among the various body parts, in the throes of death. A nervous system drugged out by money. An appalling diagram of spiritual decay and cultural veneer he thought, laughing to himself.

Hultin frowned. “Time has run away from us, Paul.”

“It’s possible,” said Hjelm. “But I’m not entirely sure.”

Neither of them spoke, allowing the pattern to settle like a screen over their retinas. When Hultin finally transformed it into a little blue spot on a cloth, it was still etched into their field of vision.

“Thanks for a great investigation.” Hjelm stretched out his hand.

Hultin shook it. “You’re a bit rough around the edges, Paul,” he said sternly. “But you might turn out to be a decent officer someday.” Then he retired to his secret alcove. Hjelm watched him. Just before he shut the door, Hultin said mildly, “Incontinence.”

Hjelm stared after him for a long time, thinking about soccer. A rock-hard wingback in diapers.

He went out to the hall, glancing inside each office as he passed, one by one. In each he saw a window streaked with rain. The summer had clearly been prematurely shelved. Maybe it was already over.

In the first office Söderstedt and Norlander chatted peacefully. The old antipathies, if not completely gone, were at least suppressed.

“I’m taking off now,” said Hjelm. “Have a good summer.”

“Go in peace.” Viggo Norlander held up the palms of his hands with their stigmata.

“Come on out to Västerås this summer,” said Arto Söderstedt. “We’re in the phone book.”

“Maybe I will,” said Hjelm, with a wave.

Out of the next room came Gunnar Nyberg in his wheelchair, its arms forced grotesquely apart by the bulk of the giant mummy’s body.

“You’re allowed to laugh,” Nyberg said in his hissing mummy voice. Hjelm took him at his word. Nyberg continued to hiss as he rolled down the corridor. “I’ve got my ride waiting downstairs.”

“Try to restrain yourself from tackling it!” shouted Hjelm after him.