Europa Blues

22

KERSTIN HOLM WAS busy. Normally, she enjoyed being busy – she liked her job. Sometimes, when she found herself alone in the police station at nine in the evening, she would tell herself to get a life, but then it always struck her that she already had one and that her job was an important part of it. Her life consisted of working, singing and a little bit of jogging.

Until one day it was no longer quite enough.

Suddenly, she found it bloody hard work being busy.

Her life was about to quietly undergo a metamorphosis. Another one. And no one had the slightest suspicion.

She was no longer in the habit of mixing her work and her private life. Her escapades with Paul Hjelm a few years earlier had been the final straw. Until then, her relationships had all been with other policemen. She was originally from Gothenburg and had been married to a colleague whose relationship to sex was utterly uncomplicated: whenever he wanted it, she wanted it. That was the starting point. It had resulted in several utterly unexpected rapes taking place in their marital bed. For a long time, she had thought that was just how things were meant to be. That was the extent to which her sexuality had been affected. By a male relative. With a fondness for special occasions and wardrobes.

That relative had long since died and her ex-husband had recently been suspended for alcoholism. Kicking someone while they were down wasn’t really her thing.

Still, she thought she knew what a genuine, wild thirst for revenge was like. And that was precisely what she found herself faced with as she received reports and material from Budapest, Maribor, Antwerp, Venice and Manchester. The last had arrived that very day; so far, Chief Inspector Roelants in Antwerp had been right – it wasn’t over yet.

A well-known pimp had, as far back as March last year, been put to death in the exact same way as Leonard Sheinkman in a park not far from Old Trafford. The case was stretching out further and further through time. The Erinyes had been busy for more than a year.

The goddesses of revenge.

Not a single witness in any of the other cases. That made their skinhead Reine Sandberg and his gang unique. They were the only people to have seen the Erinyes and survived. His associates had confirmed every last detail of his story. There had been four of them and, in blind panic, they had fled across Skogskyrkogården. When they reached the metro station, there were only three of them left. Andreas Rasmusson, who was now slowly starting to recover in the psych ward, had been wandering around among the graves for three hours. He had finally managed to find the train station and then continued his wandering in Stockholm’s Central Station, where the police had picked him up.

In a way, she wished she could feel sorry for him.

Kerstin felt like she understood. She felt like she really understood what this entire case was about: a pure, genuine, wild thirst for revenge.

The thin, dark figures dressed all in black were, without a doubt, women. What kind of women? Who had cause to murder pimps? Prostitutes, of course. It seemed likely that their so-called ninja feminist belonged to a gang of highly trained, detoxed prostitutes. According to Adib Tamir, she had been wearing: ‘red leather jacket, tight black trousers, black trainers’. Had she been wearing the other get-up beneath the red jacket? Had she been dressed for battle when she was attacked? Was that why the whole thing had been so unnecessarily violent?

On the whole, though, it wasn’t unnecessarily violent. They hadn’t been taking down any old drug-addled, small-time pimps; they had been exclusively murdering pimps who also happened to be violent criminals. All had been murderers. And all had a rape or two under their belts.

In other words, they were scum.

But imagine if what happened in Odenplan metro station was a result of controlled acts of violence. Imagine if it was a first sign that violence can never take place without leaving a trace, without sooner or later exploding and running amok. Practically all the Vietnam veterans were serious addicts, the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Japan had virtually lost their minds, and they were only just starting to see the far-reaching consequences of the violence in Yugoslavia. Violent men – and presumably women too, for that matter – were always consumed by their violent acts in the end. Executioners had always gone mad, throughout history. Their job ate them up from the inside.

But Hamid al-Jabiri wasn’t a murderous pimp. He was far from an angel, but had he deserved such a terrible end? Was he really one of those doomed to death? No, that was where the whole thing had gone off the rails. After a year. Perhaps that had been a reasonable amount of time to endure it all, before it became impossible.

Before the violence had gained a life of its own. It was no longer under control; it had started to do the controlling.

That was one interpretation, anyway.

The Erinyes had been at it for a year now. Their acts of violence were strictly controlled and didn’t affect innocent bystanders – providing, of course, you excluded Leonard Sheinkman. They quite simply targeted men they considered worthy of death. And a terrible death was exactly what they gave them. But perhaps that wasn’t all they did. What would be interesting was if their strength kept increasing. Were they recruiting at the same time as they were exacting revenge? Had eight seemingly worn-out women from the Norrboda Motell been initiated into some kind of army? Would they too start wearing tight black clothing and murdering pimps across Europe once they had finished their training? Was this a way of countering the aggressive growth of the prostitution industry?

Was it a sign that the women of Eastern Europe were fighting back?

If that was the case, Kerstin Holm hoped they wouldn’t be caught.

Yes, she was a police officer. Yes, it was her job to prevent crime and to bring criminals to justice. And yes, she hoped that they wouldn’t be caught.

That didn’t mean she wouldn’t be doing her job. She just didn’t feel especially happy about doing it.

And not just because her life was undergoing a metamorphosis.

After divorcing her policeman husband in Gothenburg, Kerstin Holm had ended up in Stockholm. The A-Unit had been formed. During a brief, intense relationship with Paul Hjelm, she had lowered her defences and told him everything. It was the first time she had ever done so, and it meant that her relationship with him was special, even once it was over. She still loved him, just not in that way. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him. But he was, with his peculiar combination of awkwardness and precision, warmness and coolness, frenzy and passivity, intellect and feeling, a man who seemed particularly full of life. It was that simple. Everything was constantly in motion inside him. He would never stagnate.

It was just that the two of them were surprisingly similar. She had fallen in love with her own mirror image. That had been the mistake. During the past few days, she had realised that that had been the mistake.

She needed something completely different.

After Paul Hjelm, she had dived straight into a strange, intense relationship with a sixty-year-old priest, a man who also happened to be dying of cancer. It had been an overwhelming experience and one which forced her to reassess the very basis of her life. That was what she had been doing for the past few years.

And then this metamorphosis. The thing she suddenly found herself in the middle of.

On her computer, she was busy checking whether the reports from Hungary, Slovenia, Germany, Belgium, Italy and England in any way suggested that prostitutes had disappeared in parallel with the murders. She had no problem with the reports from Germany, Italy and England, and with the help of a little dictionary she had compiled herself, using all the buzzwords she could think of, she was making some headway with the Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian and Dutch reports too. But quick work it was not. Each country had sent a summary of their reports in English, all more or less distorted, but if she was going to do this properly then she was going to have to delve into the chaos of the original languages used to write the reports.

She started thinking about the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis. The Tower of Babel. Why had God really decided to split that unified human language into so many? Why had He decided to make us incomprehensible to one another? Did religion really have any sensible explanation for that?

She went online to look at the Bible. The only thing she found was an old translation. It would have to do.

The whole story of the Tower of Babel was told in nine cryptic verses beginning with: ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.’ What happened next? Mankind worked out how to make bricks, eventually building a city and a tower which was to be so tall it would stretch right up into heaven. That didn’t sound so bad. But their purpose was clearly to prevent themselves from being ‘scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’. They wanted to speak one single language and live in one single place. That was when God turned up, thinking something like: it seems as though nothing is impossible for these people. And so He decided to ‘go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech’. After that, He scattered them across the globe.

There was no real explanation for God’s actions, but from what she could tell, He was using the confusion of tongues to spread mankind across the earth and prevent them getting up to any mischief in one single place. Because everything would have been possible for them if they had been able to stay as one. Even building a tower up into heaven, God’s domain.

Kerstin Holm wondered whether mankind really would have been stronger had they been able to live together in one place, speaking one single language. Would anything have been possible for them if that had been the case? She thought it sounded stifling. The oft-slandered God of the Old Testament, the Jewish God, seemed rather to have saved mankind from near-fascist uniformity, and made possible a continuous exchange between people of different languages, experiences, climates and world views. He hadn’t been afraid that the Tower of Babel would encroach into His heavenly domain at all – he had been afraid that the Tower would have been the downfall of mankind as a result of inbreeding.

If there was a God then He had, by creating the different languages, saved us from suffocating beneath our own self-sufficiency.

This reasoning in mind, she jumped straight into the strange Hungarian language and felt the challenging power of the unfamiliar mounting.

Detective Superintendent Mészöly’s report was still waiting for her. The victim in Budapest had been a twenty-nine-year-old pimp strung up in his own home on 12 October 1999. She feverishly searched for missing prostitutes from the same point in time. Mészöly hadn’t written a single word about anything similar.

Six countries, Kerstin thought, of which four were EU member states. Hungary, Slovenia, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the United Kingdom – none seemed to have a particularly good oversight on the women involved in the sex industry. The fact that she and her Swedish counterparts did was more a coincidence; the fact that they had discovered the women’s disappearance was entirely dependent on their believing it was a case of asylum seekers going underground. That was when they reacted. That was when it was decided that the country was at risk of becoming impure. If eight prostitutes had simply disappeared from the streets of Stockholm, no one would have batted an eyelid. Eight fewer people to deal with at the social welfare office. Many would have breathed a sigh of relief. Little else would have happened.

The fact that no trace of missing prostitutes appeared in the foreign reports didn’t mean that there hadn’t been any. Time for another group message to the nations involved.

She went through the old messages; she couldn’t get enough of number eight: ‘Who in high heavens authorised this inquiry? Whose budget will this come out of? WM.’ The more she read it, the more incredible it seemed. It was a brilliant summary of Waldemar Mörner’s work.

Number two was also good. The scolding from the Parisian policeman, Chief Superintendent Mérimée: ‘You, Madame Holm, seem to be using Europol resources for Swedish petty crimes.’ Considering what was currently going on around Europe, it was almost worth saving that message just so she could shove it up the good superintendent’s arse at the first opportunity.

Yes, it was true, that might have sounded a bit vengeful.

Message number one, on the other hand, was still waiting for her. The online flirt, Detective Superintendent Radcliffe from Dublin: ‘No idea what his title is, but he’s friendly. As you also seem to be, Ms Holm.’ And this friendly man he alluded to happened to be called Benziger. ‘I’m wondering whether I didn’t hear about something similar in the former DDR. Get in touch with Benziger in Weimar.’

It was true, she had completely forgotten. She found an email address for the Weimar police department and wrote a brief inquiry to the complete stranger, Benziger.

Then she sent the group inquiry off to the six countries with pimps who had been strung upside down and had a metal wire driven into their temples.

The temple, yes. Right there. Kerstin Holm touched her own thin left temple, the spot where her hair refused to grow. Wasn’t it an awful coincidence that these wires had been forced into the very spot where she herself had been shot less than a year ago, missing death by millimetres?

She didn’t like coincidences. They rarely stayed that way.

She had a vague memory of lying on a mud-soaked lawn, her blood mixing with Paul Hjelm’s beneath a heavy sky and whispering, completely exhausted, completely soaked, completely bloody, ‘Paul, I love you.’

She was afraid he had misunderstood. Of course she loved him, she did, but she didn’t quite know how.

In other words, she was undergoing a metamorphosis.

It just wasn’t something she could touch upon yet.