Europa Blues

23

THE BEAUTY OF the abstract. A case which was becoming increasingly complex, increasingly far-reaching, reduced by an anonymous artist to an extremely simple, extremely distinct plus shape.

Perhaps it should have been a minus sign.

Jan-Olov Hultin secretly wished he had been the artist. His diagrams were normally big, sprawling things, with lines and arrows in all directions, the whiteboard ending up so full that he often had to continue on the back. By the time the lines and arrows reached so far he had no choice but to spin the board to clarify each thought, his audience had usually given up.

And so he preferred the beauty of the abstract.

The polar opposite of which was piled up on the desk in front of him. For the first time since it all began, he had taken the time to read through the press reaction to the case. They had managed to keep most of it quiet so far – that was a first.

The ‘Skansen’ quadrant, to begin with. The wolverine case wasn’t really a case at all. During the first few days, there had been plenty of eye-catching headlines and close-ups of the chewed leg, and plenty said in the tabloids about just how dangerous Skansen really was for our innocent children. Pictures of children dangerously close to bears had been published. The Skansen management had been forced to stand to account in a number of television debates, with demands for their immediate resignation being made and talk of a general ban on wolverines being bandied about. The relevant government minister would be looking into the regulatory system.

Then the ‘Slagsta’ quadrant. Hultin hadn’t managed to find a single line about the eight missing women. It was, quite simply, not news.

Next, the ‘Odenplan metro station’ quadrant. Hamid al-Jabiri’s death had, fortunately, been reported as an accident. One paper had managed to take a photograph of his lower body on the tracks. They had printed it without hesitation. A television debate about safety on the metro system had so few viewers that several advertisers had clubbed together to write a discussion piece in Dagens Nyheter. It had inspired several follow-ups. One of those involved, the information officer for a brewery with a strong media presence, was estimated to have earned twenty-three thousand kronor for his articles. That in itself had started a new debate.

Lastly, the ‘Skogskyrkogården’ quadrant. The all-important question of Leonard Sheinkman’s tragic end had been treated like a racial killing of the worst kind, not least after Waldemar Mörner’s blunder during Sunday’s live press conference. Otherwise, it was Sara Svenhagen’s chlorine-green hair that was being discussed, the result of which was that she had been sent three invites to film premieres and one to Café Opera’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations.

A number of media representatives had desperately tried to bribe hospital staff into letting them talk to ‘the arrested suspect’, Andreas Rasmusson. According to one paper, he had ‘not only violated Jewish graves on this occasion, but also brutally murdered an old Jewish professor of nuclear physics’. The same piece had continued: ‘Obstinate police interviews with the suspect resulted in his admission to the psychiatric ward. One source claimed misuse of batons.’

Sheinkman’s hanging was being discussed, but the long metal wire had been kept from the press. One television channel had managed to get hold of the old cemetery caretaker, Yitzak Lemstein, who had shown them his tattooed arm. The studio audience had read signs telling them to be loudly horrified, and so they were. During the interview which followed, Lemstein had unfortunately brought up the visit from Chavez and the grave marked ‘Shtayf’. Happily, it hadn’t led to any further questions. The presenter had had some trouble comprehending the word ‘Yiddish’.

Jan-Olov Hultin spent a moment thinking about what caused strokes before pushing the pile of papers away from him and saying, without further ado: ‘We’ll have to wait for answers regarding the phone. It turns out the contract is Ukrainian after all, but apparently the Ukrainian company is unable to produce a list of calls. Their technology is about a decade behind ours, and it’s impossible, from a technical point of view. Our technicians are slowly helping them onto the right tracks. Otherwise, you know about the other new development. Arto is now formally involved in the investigation, as a Europol officer. I just heard that he’s been granted access to the suspected head of the Ghiottone organisation, the name of which means not only “wolverine” but also “glutton”. This man is a ninety-two-year-old banker called Marco di Spinelli. Arto will be visiting him this evening. Should we try to put this into some kind of order? Jorge?’

Chavez sighed gently and glanced at his papers.

‘Bits of rope have started turning up,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ve just got to hope we find the exact one, that there aren’t too many resellers, and that someone remembers whoever bought it. I know it’s a bit of a long shot, so it should hardly be our top priority. None of the ropes have matched ours yet anyway.

‘My second point is more interesting – the question is whether it was a pure coincidence that Leonard Sheinkman was strung up right next to the anonymous “Shtayf” grave. There’s a twenty-year-old murder case behind “Shtayf”. The victim was in his forties, died of knife wounds and was a concentration camp survivor. It should’ve been possible to identify him from the numbers tattooed on his forearm, but he’d evidently tried to scratch them off with a knife, meaning they were illegible. His most distinguishing feature was that he had no nose. In my opinion, it’s really odd that the Huddinge police investigation from 1981 was such a complete failure. Someone should’ve remembered seeing a man without a nose, his appearance should’ve caught someone’s attention, wherever he came from. The Interpol of the time also failed back then. I’ve re-sent them his face and fingerprints. Europe has grown and it’s more accessible now.’

Jan-Olov Hultin didn’t look like normal. Since each minute shift in his stony face immediately caught their attention, the A-Unit held its collective breath. Was this the stroke they had been dreading?

‘It was my case,’ he said, sinking into a hole in time. There was a jolt in the space-time continuum, the clocks rushing madly backwards. Jan-Olov was suddenly in his forties and found himself in a tiny, newly decorated office in the police station, leaning back with satisfaction and thinking ‘finally’. The image was as clear as day.

A moment of silence prevailed. Then Chavez said: ‘No.’

‘What?’ said Hultin, rapidly transported back through the ages. Clusters of stars raced by at a speed faster than light.

‘That’s not what it said,’ said Chavez. ‘Bruun. Superintendent Erik Bruun from Huddinge Police. Haven’t I heard that name somewhere?’

Paul Hjelm laughed. They looked at him with a tangible scepticism.

‘Erik Bruun’s my old boss,’ he explained. ‘He’s the one who coaxed me into the A-Unit.’

‘Right,’ said Chavez. ‘We went there once. But that was when he’d just retired.’

‘Heart attack,’ Hjelm nodded. ‘Too many cigars.’

Hultin was becoming more like his old self again. They collectively breathed out. The blood clot was clearly keeping its distance this time, too.

He said: ‘It was then, in September 1981, that Bruun coaxed me into CID. Clearly he’s done a lot of coaxing in his time. I was given the case on the ninth of September and started half-heartedly looking into it. I knew I’d be getting a response to my application to CID at any time; I didn’t behave very professionally those last few days. It’s the greatest blot on my career right up to the Kentucky Killer. I got the reply on the eleventh and moved here right away. Bruun more or less took over the wrecked investigation himself.’

‘I’ll be damned,’ said Hjelm. ‘I started there as a newly qualified officer in 1984. I have no memory of him ever mentioning a case involving a man without a nose.’

‘It was never a proper case,’ said Hultin. ‘Just another John Doe among others. Not even the press showed much interest. You couldn’t print images of bodies back then. Things are different now.’

‘What do you remember?’ asked Chavez.

‘He was found lying in a ditch by a little lake in Älta, right next to a highway. No tyre tracks to speak of. He was naked, two big knife wounds to the back – either of them could’ve been the cause of death. The numbers on his arm were almost illegible beneath a criss-cross of scars, as though he’d tried to scratch them off. And then that nose…’

‘I’ve got a picture here,’ said Chavez, passing an old colour photo around the Tactical Command Centre.

‘I didn’t really manage to find anything. No witnesses, no clues. It didn’t seem like anyone in all of Sweden had seen that noseless man. But like I said, I didn’t look very hard.’

‘One thing,’ said Kerstin Holm, looking down at the photograph. ‘Why wasn’t more done, considering how badly disfiguring his facial damage was? One single look would’ve been enough to make any plastic surgeon leap at the challenge.’

‘Good question,’ Hultin admitted. ‘Poverty? Lack of medical care? Outcast?’

‘And a foreigner, too,’ Kerstin added, nodding slightly.

‘Would it be worth talking to Bruun?’ Hjelm asked hopefully. He hadn’t seen his old boss since the heart attack had brought in a nightmare replacement by the name of Sten Lagnmyr.

‘I think so,’ said Hultin. ‘You and Jorge.’

‘OK,’ Hjelm and Chavez said in unison.

‘How’s it going with the boats, Sara?’ Hultin continued, looking more neutral than he had in a long while. Clearly it was time to compensate for his earlier emotional outburst.

‘Great,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘There are plenty of options if you want to get from Stockholm to Lublin by bus, especially if you have thirty-five hours to do it. That’s the amount of time between their possible departure from Slagsta and the phone call from Lublin.

‘The most logical thing would be to get on the closest ferry, from Nynäshamn, and head to Gda

sk. It’s a straight line from there, if you want to get to the Ukraine via Lublin. It’s a night ferry, leaving at 5 p.m. and not arriving in Gda

sk until half eleven the next morning. It’s roughly six hundred kilometres between Gda

sk and Lublin, and the phone call to Odenplan was made at three. So if we say it took maybe half an hour to get off the ferry, then you would have to drive at 150, 160 kilometres an hour to get to Lublin in time. It’s just not possible. It’s wrong.

‘The other plausible option if you’re going direct from Sweden would be via Karlskrona. The M/S Stena Europe left Karlskrona at nine in the evening and arrived in Gdynia at seven on Friday morning. That would mean they had eight hours to drive those six hundred kilometres. Sounds much better. So I got in touch with Stena Line to check how many buses they had on board on that date. Turns out there were eight buses on that particular ferry from Karlskrona, leaving on the fourth of May. Four of the buses were organised trips and then there was one Polish, one German and two Swedish; one of the Swedish buses was full of single men on their way east to find partners or venereal diseases or something like that. One bus was on the way to scrap in a Polish scrapyard, and the others were private hires. But here’s the interesting part. What gets smuggled from Sweden to Poland rather than the other way round?’

‘IKEA furniture?’ suggested Viggo.

‘Moose antlers?’ suggested Jorge.

‘Almost,’ said Sara. ‘Sea eagles.’

‘Poached?’ asked Kerstin.

‘Get to the point,’ said Hultin.

‘The privately owned Polish buses were full to the brim with poached sea eagles. Swedish and Polish customs were evidently working alongside our environmental protection agency. It filmed the crackdown. There were a few minutes about it on Aktuellt on Friday evening. They’ve got quite a lot of extra film that they’re going to send over a bit later today. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to spot the other buses in the background. I was also planning on taking a trip down to Karlskrona to talk to the crew on the ship. The same crew is going to Gydnia again tonight. Will the budget cover a flight down to Karlskrona?’

‘Purpose?’ asked Hultin.

‘To show them pictures of Galina Stenina, Valentina Dontsjenko, Lina Kostenko, Stefka Dafovska, Mariya Bagrjana, Natalja Vaganova, Tatjana Skoblikova and Svetlana Petruseva. To see what the crew remembers. If the women were on board, they must’ve stuck out in one way or another.’

‘Have you learned their names by heart?’ Jorge asked in surprise.

‘It’s the least you can do, working on a case like this,’ Sara said cuttingly.

‘Trip approved,’ Hultin said curtly. ‘Viggo?’

As though it was the most natural thing in the world, Viggo Norlander said: ‘We’re having another baby.’

‘For God’s sake, Viggo!’ exclaimed Gunnar Nyberg. ‘Astrid’s forty-eight.’

‘Forty-seven,’ Norlander corrected him. ‘And how old’s Professor Ludmila?’

‘Congratulations, Viggo,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Don’t listen to those fossils. They’re just jealous.’

‘Why the plural?’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘The women congratulate and the men commiserate,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Just as it should be. Congratulations, Viggo.’

‘Yeah, yeah, congratulations, you damn rabbit,’ said Hjelm.

A few more congratulations were uttered before Norlander, entirely unaffected, continued: ‘The circumstances of the other pimp’s death are, as you know, murky. The pistol which killed him was apparently made three minutes after Nikos Voultsos’s. The silencers were identical, too. I rest my case.’

‘Who was he?’ asked Kerstin Holm. ‘How did he get in touch with the girls in Slagsta? Was he the one who brought them here?’

‘His name was Finn Johansen, but he doesn’t seem the kind to have “brought” any whores here,’ said Viggo Norlander. ‘Though he did seem to have a certain talent for sniffing out new free agents. His speciality was finding girls who didn’t have any protection. So that’s probably what happened. I looked into the Norrboda Motell a little. Why was it that eight whores were given rooms right next to one another? Jörgen Nilsson clearly wasn’t the one who made that decision. He was brought in later, by none other than Finn Johansen.

‘I think it went like this: Botkyrka’s refugee centre was overflowing. When they were being moved, any single asylum seekers could put in a request if there was someone they wanted to share a room with. In the old centre, only a couple of our eight were living together. I think that they found one another somehow and decided to work together. It’s entirely possible that some of them weren’t working as whores before they came here. Though their pictures were really typical whore pictures. Johansen found out about the place and went down there to provide them with protection and drugs. I’d bet that was what happened. I’ve talked to a few whores who-’

‘Could you stop saying “whores”?’ asked Kerstin Holm.

‘Why? They are whores.’

‘There’s something so violent about that word. It’s like a rape, every time someone says it.’

Paul Hjelm glanced cautiously at her.

‘I’ll try,’ said Norlander. ‘But old dogs are old dogs.’

‘Very true,’ said Kerstin.

‘So, I’ve talked to a few girls,’ (without even a pause, Viggo thought happily, just as he continued), ‘who were part of Johansen’s group. He could be tough, apparently, but if you behaved then he was one of the better pimps on the street. That probably just means they had to go to A&E slightly less often than the others. Otherwise, there’s not much to say.’

‘Good,’ Hultin said honestly. ‘Paul?’

‘You’ve all heard about Voultsos’s stay at the Grand by now. Sixty-three thousand kronor, paid posthumously. Or rather, paid by his employer; according to Arto, the account belongs to the Ghiottone. I didn’t find anything of interest among the other phone numbers to and from Slagsta. The incoming calls were mostly from johns, the outgoing calls mostly from Finn Johansen, but under an alias of course. Girlfriend’s phone. Then there’s this thing with the Erinyes. “Ερινυ”. From a literary point of view, it’s pretty damn exciting. Have you heard of Aeschylus?’

‘I’m assuming you’ll be looking into the literary side of it in your own time?’ Jan-Olov Hultin said brutally.

‘Of course,’ Hjelm replied, continuing without further ado. ‘In ancient Greece, in the fourth century BC, people used to compete in the field of tragedies. The authors of these tragedies each wrote three dramas: they took themes from older myths, and the three tragedies belonged together, like a kind of suite. Only one complete suite, a trilogy, I suppose, survived. It was written by the eldest of the three great tragic authors, Aeschylus, and it’s called Oresteia. The first of its dramas is called Agamemnon and it’s all about a Greek commander from the Trojan War coming home. He brings a lover with him as a war trophy, an enchantress called Cassandra. His wife Clytemnestra has also found herself a new lover while he’s been away and she murders both her husband and his innocent lover. That’s the end. It sounds pretty banal, but I’ll be damned if it’s not one of the most venomous things ever to have been written. OK, part two of the suite is called The Libation Bearers. In this one, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s son Orestes is on the hunt for his mother and her lover. Honour demands that he avenges his father. A blood feud. Are you following?’

‘Mmm,’ said Hultin tentatively.

‘And just as he should, he takes his revenge and murders his mother. End of part two. The third part is called The Eumenides. Since he’s guilty of murder, Orestes is now being hunted by the most terrible beings that mythology has to offer. They come from the most ancient parts of the kingdom of the dead. They’re the goddesses of revenge, the Erinyes. “We are the children of eternal Night, And Furies in the underworld are called.”

‘They manage to catch up with Orestes, but just as the hour of vengeance is about to strike, Athena – the wise goddess of Athens – appears. In court, she replaces the ancient laws of bloodlust – the driving force behind the Erinyes – with a modern rule of law worthy of Athens’ new-won democracy. Barbarism is subdued, civilisation is triumphant. And the Erinyes are tamed; they become part of society by being offered “a calm and peaceful haven”. The era of primordial rage is over. The young, reasonable gods take over from the old, blind, hateful ones. And the Erinyes become Eumenides. Powerless, but with a new-found peace. For the first time ever.’

Hjelm glanced around the Tactical Command Centre. It actually looked as though they were listening.

‘Is that how we want this to end?’ he asked.

There was a moment of silence. He looked at Kerstin; she looked back. With the same look he had given her. And it was very, very difficult to interpret.

Eventually, Hultin said: ‘Don’t you read anything else?’

‘Yeah,’ said Hjelm. ‘Leonard Sheinkman’s diary. But it’s too hard right now. I’d like to come back to it.’

‘Too hard?’

‘Too hard.’

‘Right then,’ said Hultin, slightly paralysed. ‘Well, Gunnar?’

‘One new thing,’ said Gunnar Nyberg. ‘The other skinheads confirmed Reine Sandberg’s version of events. They went out there to get drunk, break gravestones and sing Nazi battle songs in the Jewish cemetery. Then they caught sight of the old man. He didn’t have a little hat on, but they knew right away he was Jewish. They’d been planning on going over to harass him, maybe even beat him up a bit. And in that excited state of mind, they saw the black figures gliding over. That’s when they got scared like only those with exaggerated, false courage can be. They ran like mad.’

‘And the new thing?’ Hultin said neutrally.

‘He’d stopped at the gravestone. Leonard Sheinkman was standing by the gravestone with “Shtayf” on it.’

‘Yes!’ blurted Chavez. ‘I knew it.’

Nyberg continued, unperturbed: ‘When Sheinkman saw that the grave was broken, it looked like he started laughing. He bent down and touched the broken pieces. That was when the figures appeared. They peeled away from the trees like “strips of bark”, according to this Reine guy. The skinhead who stayed the longest says they were talking. Sheinkman exchanged a few words with the dark figures. Completely calm. Then it all happened really quickly, as though the whole process had been practised.’

‘It had been,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘It was the eighth time. At least. If I’ve managed to get on top of things, then it started in March last year. In Manchester. It was Antwerp in July, Budapest in October, Wiesbaden in December, Venice in February, Maribor in March – and Stockholm in May. You can see how the pace has been picking up. They’re getting better and better. It took them two months to plan the Stockholm attack. They had a lot to coordinate here, after all.

‘Stockholm was a renewal on many levels. A development. On the one hand, they were sending a sophisticated message to the Ghiottone organisation in Milan. On the other, they were going to murder another man, someone from a completely new category: an old professor. Both of these are a bit mysterious. Why send a greeting to Milan? Why murder a man who can’t plausibly have had the slightest thing to do with prostitution or pimps? Does the message to the syndicate in Milan mean something like we know who you are, you haven’t heard the last of us?’

‘Doesn’t sound so implausible,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Maybe they’ve finally managed to find one of the big crime syndicates behind the growth in prostitution across Europe? And now they’re going after it, and they want them to know. They’re doing their bit for their fellow man.’

‘Isn’t it funny that we automatically say “man”? I do it too. But the fact is, if that’s true then they’re doing it for their fellow women. Our language always conditions us to put the emphasis on men. Just like society.’

‘And biology,’ said Jorge.

‘What are you saying?’ exclaimed Sara.

‘I read a comment piece in the newspaper this morning, by a scientist in forensic psychology. According to him, male violence is a purely biological phenomenon and has nothing to do with man’s role in society. There was even a diagram, with one line showing the concentration of testosterone in the blood and another the number of violent crimes which led to prosecution. The two lines followed each other point for point. Testosterone causes violence. Men who’ve been castrated have a decreased tendency for aggression. Evolution put this tendency for aggression in the male species so that they would compete with other men for the chance to reproduce and provide food. In all known cultures at all known times, men have been more prone to violence than women. All men are violent, but since we primarily focus on what’s in our own interests, we realise that using violence in the type of society we live in doesn’t have a positive effect. And so we divert our tendency to violence towards other, more productive activities, like sport.’

‘Just wait until you get home and we’ll see if that’s true,’ Sara Svenhagen said violently.

‘I’m just quoting the article,’ Jorge Chavez replied, castrated. ‘It’s interesting that this kind of thinking is actually in circulation among prominent scientists. He even had examples from the animal kingdom. I thought stuff like this had been disproved. Not least by huge female spiders killing their tiny males right after mating.’

Kerstin Holm said: ‘Biologism is all about the idea of people being completely controlled by the laws of biology. Economism means that all human activity can be linked to some kind of profit. Two words we should learn.’

‘This is all a bit close to measuring skulls for my liking,’ said Hjelm. ‘State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala.’

‘The Erinyes,’ said Holm. ‘It’s interesting that the ancient Greeks made their most violent beings women.’

‘Meaning our violently inclined Erinyes can’t be women,’ Hultin said neutrally. ‘Rethink.’

They looked at him. He didn’t bat an eyelid.

‘Should we try to move on now?’ he said eventually. ‘So that at least some work gets done?’

Kerstin tried to go back to her earlier train of thought. Finally, it led to something:

‘Maybe their Stockholm attack also involved a renewal of a third kind. We’ve got no proof that any prostitutes have been recruited before – but it seems like that’s what happened here, that the Slagsta girls are being transported to their base in Ukraine. It might be the first time it’s happened, and in that case, it’s a matter of starting to liberate prostitutes. Though it might well have happened earlier – the various European authorities’ knowledge of fallen women isn’t always exemplary.’

‘What kind of girls are these Erinyes, really?’ asked Viggo Norlander. ‘I mean, it doesn’t just seem to be the woman from Odenplan who’s highly trained; there seem to be at least five of them?’

‘I still get the impression she’s the leader,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘She’s the one who was in contact with Slagsta, the one they called from the bus in Lublin. But yes, they all seem well trained…’

‘So at least five in Södra Begravningsplatsen,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Plus at least one more on the bus, whoever it was who rang. The tour guide or something. Sounds like a pretty big organisation.’

‘And I think it’s getting bigger and bigger,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘But, Viggo, what kind of girls? It’s pretty serious violence. There must be hate and revenge involved. I think it’s a group of former prostitutes from Eastern Europe finally hitting back.’

‘With the maximum amount of pain possible,’ said Paul Hjelm.

‘Yeah. First they practically scare the life out of their victims with their ghostly creeping about. Then they use a near-scientific method to cause as much pain as they possibly can. It’s specialised, for sure.’

‘It’s certainly not normal,’ said Chavez.

‘No,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘It’s certainly not normal.’