Europa Blues

16

ANJA SAW IT long before he did. Five children saw it long before he did. The entire world saw it long before he did.

That he had, just maybe, had ever so slightly too much ‘beauty’ and ‘peace’.

Arto Söderstedt wandered around the little stone house in Chianti, telling himself he was still enjoying it as much as ever. As the spring evenings turned into night, he sat on the porch with a small glass of Vin Santo, dipping his cinnamon biscotti and thinking: I’m enjoying this. And of course he was still enjoying it. Of course the regenerative powers of the Renaissance had been making their way all the way up to his rustic Tuscan bedroom. Of course marital life was blossoming like never before; he half suspected Anja might be planning a sixth child – what had happened to the usual preventative precautions? And, of course, it was still utterly agreeable to be able to sleep as long as he liked in the mornings, before diving into the books he wanted to read, the music he wanted to listen to, the wine and coffee he wanted to drink, the bits and pieces he wanted to busy himself with. But somehow, somewhere, it still wasn’t quite enough. Somehow, the fruits of Uncle Pertti’s money weren’t quite enough.

Anja, on the other hand, was enjoying herself to the full, but she didn’t make such a big deal out of her enjoyment. Arto possessed the male species’ tendency to display his well-being to all – displays which have a tendency to consume whatever is being displayed. In the end, the show becomes the main event. And so at that moment, he was living in a shell made from the enjoyment of life. If someone were to inadvertently bump the surface, it would crack and break into pieces and Arto Söderstedt would find himself staring down into the deepest, darkest infernal abyss.

Well, not quite. But occasionally, as he sat there on the porch looking out at Anja’s increasingly magnificent plants, it struck him that he was an addict.

A work addict in detox.

Anja had one passion in life – other than Arto, whom she probably loved as intensely as he loved her. Her second passion was herbs. During their time living in Västerås, she had pursued that passion with a burning frenzy; in the pots lining the windows on Bondegatan, things had been slightly more hesitant. But here, in Tuscany, in the heart of Chianti, in the immediate vicinity of the wonderful little medieval town of Montefioralle, crowning the hillside outside the wine capital, Greve – here, her passion was blooming. She never wanted to leave. The garden was bathed in the most delightful of scents. Her fingers were greener than ever and, according to locals, no one in the whole of Chianti had ever managed to grow sixteen different types of basil. The fact was, they hadn’t even known there were so many different kinds. Still, they were impressed, the neighbours.

The neighbours, yes.

But there was one person enjoying herself even more than Anja. It was Mikaela, their eldest daughter. She was sixteen years old and the most beautiful thing in the whole world. But one morning, she had come down to breakfast in their roomy Tuscan kitchen and no longer been a virgin.

Arto would never be able to put his finger on exactly how he had known, but it was undeniable. She was glowing. Her entire being was shining. He wondered whether he should take on the role of disgraced father, heading out into the bushes with a shotgun and blasting to smithereens every single teenage salami hanging from every single teenage body in the neighbourhood. But things didn’t turn out that way.

All he did was smile a smile that was probably as blissful as Mikaela’s; her own vanished the moment she caught sight of its own depraved mirror image. She ran out among the vines, thoroughly ashamed of herself. He followed her, shouting that it was all OK so long as she made sure the boy used a condom. Four white heads, each a different height from the ground, stood there staring at him as he shouted P-words at the vines. Even little Lina knew about P-words and she knew that they weren’t good, but she didn’t know exactly what P-words were. Porn words, the second eldest daughter explained, a glimmer of the forbidden in her eyes. Oh, said Lina, not knowing what porn words were either.

Eventually, Mikaela crept out from the vines with flame-red cheeks, like a Colorado potato beetle.

When Anja crawled out of bed and came out onto the terrace, her husband and daughter were hugging one another in the mild morning sunshine, flanked by four white heads, each a different height from the ground. Her herbs were wrapping the scene in a heaven-scented blanket, and birdsong was echoing between the olive trees. It was an image she would never forget. Paradise really did exist.

But for Arto, it was still just a shell. Anja could see that and so she secretly turned on the mobile phone. They would ring sooner or later, that much she knew.

And just a few days later, they did.

The Söderstedt family was in Florence at the time. It was their second visit of their stay in Tuscany. The first time they went, Arto had lost the plot in Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel in the San Lorenzo Church and simply refused to leave. After half an hour in its handful of square metres, the rest of the family had had enough and headed outside. They had gone for a hearty lunch in a popular restaurant down on Lungarno Acciaiuoli, over by the Arno River, and then wandered back to Piazza di Signoria and Il Duomo and returned, after three hours, to the Medici Chapel. Their father had still been standing in the tiny space, his eyes fixed on its green-and-white marble walls.

He was convinced that he had suddenly, as though in a vision, understood all the secrets of the Renaissance. The restrained excess always present just beneath the surface of Michelangelo’s unfailingly precise handiwork was hypnotic. Everything was possible – and yet all was not done. There was a distance there which wasn’t aesthetic, but rather showed that now, right now, in late-fifteenth-century Florence, everything, absolutely everything was possible. They had to drag him away with force.

And so the family had returned for a slightly more normal visit. Acting more like a proper tourist family from barbarian Scandinavia.

They were sitting, looking out over the city, at a round table in a restaurant on Piazzale Michelangelo, on the other side of the Arno. Viewed from above, they would have looked like a perfectly circular pearl necklace.

That was when the phone started ringing.

Arto Söderstedt, who had been excused from driving, had ordered a bottle of wine and didn’t react. The phone kept on ringing, and he continued not reacting. His family was looking at him with growing scepticism.

‘Is Daddy dead?’ little Lina asked, worrying that she might have said a P-word.

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Anja. ‘It doesn’t make much of a difference.’

Finally he spoke, his voice robotic. ‘That can’t possibly be my phone. My phone is switched off. Switched-off phones don’t ring.’

They waited. Time stood still.

Later, with a high-calibre pistol jammed into his mouth, Arto Söderstedt would look back at that moment and think: Then, right then, anything had been possible. Then, just then, it would have been possible to resist, and not just aesthetically. Right then, you could’ve resisted answering the phone. Everything could have stayed as it was, in a state of paradise which you, you rogue, foolishly failed to set any worth on. You had the chance to resist and you turned it down. It had been a terrible decision.

He answered: ‘Arto by Arno.’

And with that, he was silent for exactly fourteen minutes.

‘What about now?’ little Lina asked. ‘Is Daddy dead now?’

Those were the only words spoken. Anja tipped the bottle of wine slightly, trying to assess just how much her husband had drunk. Deciding that it couldn’t have been much more than a glass, she drank the rest of the bottle herself. It took exactly fourteen minutes. When he hung up, she said, perhaps not all that clearly: ‘I’m afraid I can’t drive home.’

To which Arto replied, with crystal-clear logic: ‘We’ve got to find a fax machine.’

The family trundled off to a nearby luxury hotel, where he explained that he was a policeman and that he would like to receive a fax. The porter would long regret his readiness to help.

Söderstedt phoned Hultin on his mobile and told him the number for the fax machine. Soon after, sixty-five sheets of paper came tumbling out. The porter thought about ink cartridges and engaged phone lines, but maintained the expression of friendly indulgence he had been taught to wear. Once all of the sheets were gathered together, he was handed, to his surprise, one hundred thousand lire.

‘Could I have a receipt for that?’ asked Arto Söderstedt.

Having written his first ever tip receipt, the porter said goodbye to the strangest family he had ever met. Quite how it had happened, he didn’t know, but he was one hundred thousand lire richer.

Milan was a big city in a completely different way to Florence. Everything was noisy. Arto Söderstedt weaved around in his big family car, always managing to return to the exact same place: a stinking refuse-disposal plant with flickering flames that reached ten metres up into the sky. No matter which way he turned the map, he couldn’t understand how this damned refuse plant ended up as the absolute centre of the city.

Milan was, after all, a city which really did have a centre. It had been built in concentric circles around the majestic, almost grotesque cathedral, which Söderstedt eventually drove past. He chugged around like an exhaust-fume terrorist and, after some shilly-shallying, managed to find a parking space less than five or so kilometres from the police station on Corso Monforte.

That was where he was headed.

After a walk which was better suited to the name ‘city orientation’, he made his way in through the entrance – and, in doing so, entered the fifties. The place was a time machine. Somehow, he had stepped into a worm hole and been flung back four decades. (It was, without doubt, the 1950s he found himself in.) Austere-looking men in white shirts and narrow black ties; women in dresses and high-heeled shoes; rows of desks where the main tools were pens and paper. And rubber stamps, of course. Stamps, stamps, stamps. Not a single computer as far as the eye could see.

He went over to a woman sitting at one of the desks and asked: ‘Commissioner Italo Marconi?’

Without looking up, the woman pointed to a closed door thirty or so metres away. As he walked over to it, he counted the number of desks he passed. He was on the verge of falling asleep on his feet. It was like counting sheep.

Sure enough, on the door, in minimalist letters, a plaque read: ‘I. Marconi’. Short and sweet.

He knocked, receiving a muttering in reply.

He opened the door.

It had been hot and humid out in the big fifties office, but it felt much cooler and more comfortable inside Marconi’s room. There was an ultra-modern computer on the enormous antique oak desk. Söderstedt understood. He had passed through the twilight zone and found his way back to the present.

The man behind the desk was in his early fifties, roughly the same age as Arto Söderstedt, and had a mighty moustache. His slender body made it seem even bigger, like a great big propeller in the middle of his face. Söderstedt was worried he might lift off at any moment and chug off through the window. The man stared at him, like Söderstedt was some kind of albino assassin from a terrible gangster film. Then his face lit up like the sun.

‘I see,’ he said in English, walking the considerable distance around his desk and holding out his hand. ‘Mister Sadestatt from Sweden.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mister Sadestatt from Sweden. ‘And you must be Italo Marconi.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Marconi replied. ‘I hear your country has animals responsible for killing one of my nastiest pimps. Could I import them?’

Arto Söderstedt laughed politely and was immediately confronted by a tricky-to-translate word. He couldn’t for the life of him remember the English word for wolverine. Was it wasp? No, that wasn’t it. Or…?

To hell with it.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was you, wasn’t it, who was in charge of the investigation into the Greek, Nikos Voultsos?’

Italo Marconi’s smile faltered; all his preconceived notions about socially inept northern Europeans had been confirmed. He made a gesture towards a chair opposite the desk and Söderstedt sat down on it. Or rather in it. It was quite soft.

‘That is correct,’ said Marconi. ‘Nikos Voultsos was a particularly unpleasant criminal. Completely lacking a conscience. We were happy when he disappeared and we’re even happier now that he’s dead.’

Plain talking, Söderstedt thought, before asking: ‘Was it you, Commissioner, who was responsible for the case summary which was given to Interpol and sent on to Stockholm?’

‘It was,’ Marconi nodded. ‘Would you like some coffee, Signor Sadestatt?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Söderstedt.

‘I’ll go and ask for some,’ said the commissioner, disappearing out of the room. He came back after a few minutes. It looked as though he had been laughing.

‘The coffee will be here soon,’ he said, repeating the walk around the desk, sitting down, leaning forward and continuing: ‘I know my report might have seemed sparse, but there just isn’t room for all the information in such a report. But I’m completely at your disposal – I just checked with my superiors. What is it you would like to know?’

‘Was Voultsos a mafioso?’

Marconi spluttered. How to explain the national state of affairs to the village idiot?

‘There is no Mafia here,’ he said. ‘It sticks to Sicily. We do, however, have local criminal gangs. Our assessment is that Nikos Voultsos was tied to one of these gangs.’

‘How was he able to commit a whole string of serious crimes without you even arresting him?’

‘You really are getting stuck straight in,’ Marconi replied, observing his chalk-white counterpart. ‘It’s important you understand a few fundamental things about the Italian justice system. We have to move slowly and pay close attention to where we step. There are always plenty of things to be taken into consideration in a whole host of different directions. I can’t go into any more detail than that. The important thing is that we had Nikos Voultsos under surveillance.’

‘Were you watching his brothel?’

Marconi snorted with laughter.

‘There are brothels and then there are brothels,’ he said, fixing his gaze on Söderstedt. ‘I can see that you are impatient, Signor Sadestatt. You’ve been without anything to do for too long, poking your toe in the dry Tuscan earth in search of pastures new. And now you’ve been given an opportunity. You’re charging ahead like an addict on the hunt for his first hit of the week.’

Arto Söderstedt wasn’t keen on Marconi’s turn of phrase. Not keen at all. But he knew what he meant.

Without raising his voice, but with his moustache about to start spinning, Marconi continued: ‘Your boss described you as one of Sweden’s most intelligent policemen. I have no reason to doubt Signor Oltin – he sounded like a level-headed man. But he also pointed out that you would probably act as you have until now: hot-headedly. In a minute or two, my secretary will bring the coffee and a tiny little grappa, to toast your presence in Tuscany – a place which, for us up here in the north, also seems like paradise, if a bit boring. So let’s partake of these drinks and see if we can’t find some other tone for the conversation.’

Söderstedt, normally so good at taking the bearing of a situation and breathing in the atmosphere, immediately realised that Marconi was right.

He nodded weakly and said: ‘You’re absolutely right. I apologise.’

That wasn’t something which happened so often.

As their conversation turned to familial structure and living conditions, Arto Söderstedt began to understand what the Italian way of working was like. He was recovering from an accident.

A culture clash.

The coffee arrived. The tiny little grappa turned out to be a glass filled to the brim. Marconi raised his glass slightly and Söderstedt mirrored the gesture. He sipped the grappa – a good one, it tasted of grapes rather than industrial waste. Grappa, the Italian schnapps, was, after all, a by-product of the wine industry.

‘Very nice,’ said Söderstedt.

‘It makes me happy to see you enjoy it,’ said Marconi. ‘It’s from your area, the Castello di Verrazzano vineyards up among the rugged hills to the north of Greve. Aside from this superb grappa they make, in my opinion, one of Chianti’s best white wines, which are hardly a Tuscan speciality otherwise.’

Then they sipped the magnificent espresso, the firm foam on which suggested that the police station had its own espresso machine tucked away somewhere in its jungle of desks.

‘So,’ said Marconi, putting the little cup to one side, ‘now I want to say a few words about Nikos Voultsos. The events in Stockholm are more or less clear, and plenty of it fits with what we know about Voultsos and his employers. What doesn’t fit in the picture is, of course, your Nobel Prize winner.’

Nominee, Söderstedt thought, though he didn’t say it aloud. He liked to think he had learned to sit. Even though he was an old dog.

‘Well, from our side, you can’t count on any link between Nikos Voultsos and’ – Marconi read from a piece of paper – ‘Leonard Sheinkman. I’d also struggle to give you anything about the murderer’s identity. That said, I can give you suggestions as to a motive.

‘There’s a kind of war going on in Europe, Signor Sadestatt. East, west, north and south are meeting, and that means several different types of criminality coming together – it means an endless war for control over the main spheres. Drugs have long been the most important, and weapons are big, of course – alcohol and cigarettes too; but data smuggling and the smuggling of stolen goods to the East – above all cars and boats stolen from the West – are relatively new. But the really big new market is women, and to a large extent Eastern European women.

‘The big crime syndicates have only just started to realise that, and so they’ve started making serious moves into the prostitution branch. Talking about brothels is not exactly right – they do have them, of course, but they’re secondary – it’s more about controlling prostitution as a whole, from the most elegant of escort services to the weariest of whores on street corners.

‘Sex is the thing we men are willing to spend most money on, more than alcohol and drugs. Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope buried somewhere in that monstrous fact. Though hope is hardly the right word when it comes to the business itself. Prostitution comes increasingly hand in hand with drugs these days. They keep the women in check with drugs until they’re worn out and then they just throw them away and bring in replacements from their inexhaustible Eastern European pool. What we’ve been seeing lately is that the women are being cast aside much, much quicker than before. These days, you’re done being a whore by thirty. By which age, as a rule, you’re also dead. At least if you come from the East.’

Marconi lit a cigarette and held the packet out to Söderstedt, who took one without thinking. Since he had smoked a total of three cigarettes in his entire life, the grappa alone made the next ten minutes bearable.

That and Marconi’s sparse information.

‘So there’s your background,’ he continued. ‘The Italian criminal organisations, though they’ve been overshadowed slightly by the Russians, have started to catch on to these developments in the modern slave trade. They buy in experienced pimps and send them out across Europe to take over independent groups of prostitutes. Nikos Voultsos was that kind of pimp, probably sent there by a crime syndicate here in Milan.

‘As far as we know, the syndicate brought him over to Italy as early as 1993, after he murdered three prostitutes who tried to get away from him in Piraeus, Athens’ seaport. The organisation in Milan, they’re called the Ghiottone, realised he was someone they could use. I’ve spent my entire working life on that organisation and I’ve seen just how deep into north Italian society it reaches. That’s why I’ve had to move forward so carefully.

‘Everything suggests that highly placed individuals of all kinds are involved in the Ghiottone. And that’s why I must also ask you to proceed as carefully as I have. One careless step from your side, Signor Sadestatt, and decades of work will be ruined. It’s important you understand that. You look so white.’

‘I am white,’ said Söderstedt, realising that he was more green at that particular moment. ‘It’s my nature.’

He stubbed out the cigarette after smoking only half of it; that had to be enough to count as social competence.

Marconi looked sceptically at the cigarette and the empty grappa glass, and carried on regardless. ‘After a lot of work, we found the spider in the web; we’re fairly sure that the brains behind the Ghiottone syndicate here in Milan is a respected old banker. He was active in local politics and is now one of the driving forces behind Lega Nord, if you’ve heard of it.’

‘Separatist party in the north which wants to split the country into a rich north and a poor south,’ Söderstedt coughed.

‘Roughly, yes. I don’t want to reveal the name of this man here, but the reason we left Nikos Voultsos alone, despite the fact that he was suspected of at least five serious crimes, is that we’re after bigger fish. If we can break Ghiottone from the top then everyone else in the organisation will be biting the dust. Though it seems it was in vain. Your otters took that part of our job away.’

‘I see,’ said Söderstedt, feeling as though a pigment or two was starting to return to his face. Since he still couldn’t remember the word for wolverine in English, he didn’t bother to correct the commissioner’s zoological mistake. Instead, he went on: ‘And the motive for Voultsos’s murder?’

‘Competition,’ Marconi said nonchalantly. ‘As I said, there’s a war going on in Europe. For control of the prostitution. From what we can tell, it was an Eastern European crime syndicate with ambitions in Sweden which killed him. Using badgers.’

Söderstedt nodded. Marconi was clearly planning on going through every single member of the marten family – other than the wolverine itself. It made him feel slightly annoyed.

Marconi held up what looked like a fax.

‘Your assignment has been officially sanctioned, Signor Sadestatt. It seems you’ve been granted a provisional position with the European police agency, Europol. Formally, that means you have full access to my investigation. How is your Italian?’

‘Not quite conversational,’ said Söderstedt. ‘But I can read it fine.’

‘Great,’ said Marconi, handing a cubiform box to his new Europol colleague, who stared at it in confusion. ‘A collection of CDs containing the whole Ghiottone investigation. I’m assuming you have a computer.’

Söderstedt nodded. He had mostly been using his little laptop to play hearts, the banal but relaxing card game which came pre-installed with Windows. He very rarely won.

‘You’ll find the names of all the suspects, including the key figure, the banker. Your contract means you’re bound by professional secrecy and that any indication of anyone but yourself having access to these disks will be treated as a criminal act. Is that understood?’

‘Understood,’ said Söderstedt. ‘One thing, though. The strange method of execution. Have you ever come across anything like it?’

‘You mean the weasels?’ asked Italo Marconi, smiling.

‘No, I mean the wire in the brain. I mean the hanging upside down.’

The commissioner nodded. He had understood. The whole thing with the otters and badgers and weasels was just some kind of game that Söderstedt hadn’t understood – yet. But he knew that he would understand it soon. He resisted.

‘I’ve actually put a few men on to that,’ said Marconi. ‘We’re currently going through murders in our country, looking for similar cases.’

‘I suspected you might be,’ said Söderstedt. He thought Marconi would catch the appreciation hidden in that line.

Marconi’s smile suggested that he had.

He stood up and held out his hand. Söderstedt took it. His respect for the Italian police force had increased markedly.

‘I’ve got a feeling we’ll be hearing from one another again,’ Italo Marconi said, stroking his enormous moustache.

‘Same,’ said Arto Söderstedt, shaking the hand which had been extended to him and turning to leave. As he reached the door, he heard Marconi’s voice.

‘By the way, do you know what ghiottone means in Italian?’

Söderstedt turned round.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Ghiottone means wolverine,’ said Italo Marconi.

Söderstedt laughed.

Of course it did.