Europa Blues

33

ODESSA WAS A former beauty. That sounded like a quote from a tourist brochure.

Arto Söderstedt was slightly disappointed that all of his expectations had been confirmed. Each worn-out, vodka-soaked alcoholic he passed – and they weren’t few and far between – was a potential robber, and he was constantly being accosted by beggars, primarily children, asking him to buy dog-eared postcards for astronomical prices. The city also had a very particular scent. Like a past-it whore, he thought brutally to himself. Cheap perfume to disguise the decay.

He still hadn’t been given the opportunity to cajole the reluctant Eastern European policemen and women without computers into cooperating with him; he was walking around, waiting for them to start work. ‘A bit later, maybe,’ a neighbour to the police station had reeled off in muddled German.

He had no real reason to go back to the hotel either. With its combination of extravagance and decay, it stood like a symbol of Odessa. And so he was wandering. He made his way to the water’s edge – which wasn’t there. Odessa was a port city with a slight quirk: it sat a few hundred metres above the water. The only thing linking the city to the water were those world-famous steps down which the pushchair had bounced in Eisenstein’s revolutionary Battleship Potemkin. Before those stairs were built in the nineteenth century, there had been no direct link between city and water, between Odessa and the Black Sea.

The city had been powerful once, and it probably still did make a striking impression from down on the water. But walking through it, Söderstedt thought it felt shabby above all else. A relic of a bygone era. Transport to Ukraine’s most important port was carried out along other routes these days, of course, but back then, the liveliness of the steps had been clear. It was no coincidence that it had been used as a symbol of capitalist economics in Eisenstein’s film.

At least that was how Arto Söderstedt interpreted it.

But now, the steps seemed to be nothing more than a refuge for all kinds of riff-raff, beggars and junkies, and walking down them presented visitors with an immediate health risk. Before Söderstedt ventured down, he nipped over to some shrubbery and broke off a branch. It looked like a walking stick, but in reality it was a weapon. He was ready to defend himself. Not that it could look that way.

He walked down and he walked back up. He counted seventeen more potential attackers, beggars dressed as postcard sellers. In addition to that – despite all attempts to defend himself with the branch – he made it back up with three splashes of vodka on his clothes. Fortunately no vomit.

He paused at the top of the steps with the branch in his hand. In the nearest shop window, Uncle Pertti was standing with his hand on his sabre. Arto stared at him, bewitched. Uncle Pertti stared back. Arto dropped the branch. Uncle Pertti dropped the sabre. Arto stuck out his tongue. Uncle Pertti did the same.

The spell was broken.

What did the old devil want? Söderstedt wondered, leaving him behind among the boots in the shop window. Why this obstinacy?

He wandered along the grand old promenade and looked out over the cold, dark surface of the Black Sea, glittering beautifully in the morning sun. He noticed that with each moment that passed, he was becoming more favourably inclined to the city. It had a beauty which wasn’t ingratiating, the way the beauty of Italian cities often could be. It was a beauty which didn’t try to hide its faults. Instead, it seemed to be saying: here I am, take it or leave it. More or less like Uncle Pertti.

He walked past the famous opera house and university. The buildings really were beautiful. He wasn’t even sure that the decay was tragic any more. Perhaps the march of time should be preserved in works of art. Perhaps it shouldn’t be restored and adorned and tarted up and masqueraded as something it wasn’t. Corroded by time – like everything else on earth. Should art really be lifted up and furnished with an eternal value that was, in its very foundation, false? Even if the alternative was obliteration? If time was nothing but a saboteur, a destroyer of eternal values? If that was the case, shouldn’t it be withstood?

It was the classic argument of the plastic surgeon…

Just as he was starting to feel as though something truly substantial was on the way, he arrived – without really having planned it – back at the police station. This time, the door was open.

He ambled about its decayed old corridors and remarked to himself that he was using the word ‘decay’ a little too often. If this exact corridor had been in Sweden or Finland, would he still have thought of it as decayed? Or was it simply the case that the word was inseparably associated with this particular city? Irrevocably linked to Odessa?

That was when it struck him that Odessa wasn’t just a city. It was also an organisation. A particularly unpleasant organisation. Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen. The Organisation of Former SS Members. Founded in 1947 with the sole intention of helping high-ranking Nazis gain new identities in South America and the Middle East. Replaced by the Kameradenwerke in 1952.

He couldn’t quite get the context straight, but it was there. He felt it a little more keenly as he knocked on a door bearing Cyrillic letters reading something along the lines of ‘Commissioner Alexej Svitlytjnyj’. The name of the man he was looking for, at least.

Alexej Svitlytjnyj was sitting at his desk and had been forewarned. Just as Söderstedt had suspected, there was no computer on his superbly crafted desk. There was, however, an oddly shaped cigarette hanging from the mouth of the big, composed man in the impeccable Eastern European suit. It looked like one of the suits Soviet leaders used to wear when they stood on a platform above Red Square, waving stiffly to the military parades passing by below. Arto Söderstedt had always suspected that those men had been stuffed and remote-controlled.

Svitlytjnyj was neither, but he was, however, rather apathetic. His English was also surprisingly eloquent.

‘I checked with the Ministry of Justice,’ he said once their introductions were over and done with. ‘As a representative of Europol, it’s perfectly OK for you to access our investigatory materials. But sending it halfway across the world to the Swedish police was a different matter.’

‘So have you managed to identify the noseless man?’ asked Söderstedt.

Svitlytjnyj nodded gravely like an old brown bear.

He looks like a Nevalyashka doll, Söderstedt thought, happy to make use of a long-neglected word from his childhood. Like one of those little plastic dolls with big round heads which teetered back and forth for all eternity when you set them in motion.

‘That’s correct,’ Svitlytjnyj eventually said, sluggishly holding out a dog-eared brown folder with a hammer and sickle on the cover. ‘From the Soviet days,’ he added with a gesture to the Communist hammer and sickle symbol. ‘That was another part of the problem when it came to sharing the material.’

Söderstedt opened the file and stared down into a forest of Cyrillic letters.

‘It’s in Russian,’ he said thoughtlessly.

‘No it isn’t,’ said Svitlytjnyj. ‘It’s Ukrainian. A language spoken by seven times more people than Swedish.’

‘Sorry,’ Söderstedt replied courteously.

‘Turn the page,’ said Svitlytjnyj. ‘There’s a photograph.’

Söderstedt did as he was told. Staring at him was an utterly strange figure with a dark gaze.

The figure had no nose.

‘His name was Kouzmin,’ the commissioner said, taking a deep drag from his cigarette. By this point, there were only about four millimetres of it left. Söderstedt wondered how it would all pan out – would it last another drag?

‘Koutjschmin?’ he tried.

Svitlytjnyj nodded sideways and made a bobbing motion with his hand.

‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Franz Kouzmin. His criminal record isn’t particularly extensive. Mostly linked to a long-standing, intense vodka habit. Petty crimes. Break-ins, receiving stolen goods, drunkenness. Hardly a major criminal. He was reported missing by his daughter at the end of September 1981. Apparently he was a widower.’

‘Does it say anything about his nose?’ Söderstedt asked.

‘His missing nose,’ Svitlytjnyj said, getting to his feet; it took him almost thirty seconds. ‘Might I suggest we carry on in the computer room?’

A mystery, Söderstedt thought. The minuscule cigarette had disappeared without a trace. In its place was a freshly rolled, newly lit cigarette. The switch had taken place without him, the seasoned Finnish-Swedish detective, noticing a thing.

‘You’ve got a computer room?’ he asked distractedly, getting up.

Svitlytjnyj chuckled and took a long drag.

‘You weren’t expecting that, were you?’ he said.

They went out into the corridor and wandered through all eternity.

‘We’re busy transferring the old archive over to the new computer system,’ the commissioner said. ‘And taking the opportunity to translate it all into English. It takes time. We’re up to “L”. You’re in luck.’

‘What about the nose?’ Söderstedt persisted.

‘The missing nose,’ Svitlytjnyj persisted, opening a door.

The room they entered was a hackers’ paradise. All the computers seemed to be the latest possible models. Several men and women were tapping away at keys on trendy, lightning-fast terminals. The impression it gave was more American stock-market company than Ukrainian police department.

‘You look a bit dumbfounded,’ Svitlytjnyj said with a smile.

‘How can you afford all this?’ Söderstedt blurted out undiplomatically.

‘Mafia money,’ the commissioner said with a straight face.

Several others in the room burst into laughter.

‘Let me brief you,’ Svitlytjnyj continued. And so, in peace and quiet – and in perfect English – Arto Söderstedt read the files on Franz Kouzmin.

His twelve-year-old daughter, who had been living in an orphanage at the time, had reported him missing at the end of September, when she had gone for her monthly visit. His wife had died of cancer just two years after the daughter was born, and when his alcoholism worsened, she had been taken away and placed into an orphanage. There were excerpts from an interview with her.

‘Dad had just stopped drinking,’ she had said. ‘He’d been completely clean for a month. And really, really happy.’ Though she had no idea why.

OK, Söderstedt thought, checking himself. Kouzmin stopped drinking and was happy, expectant. Like a man going on a trip. A trip to Sweden. He had clearly found something, and that something made him fight a long-standing alcohol problem and board the M/S Cosmopolit, bound for Frihamnen in Stockholm.

He read on.

Suddenly, the nose question was solved. He should have guessed. They all should have.

Franz Kouzmin had been adopted by a Ukrainian woman who had taken care of him in Buchenwald, where his parents had died. He had been subjected to a medical experiment related to breathing. An investigation into how important the airways in the nose were for the human ability to breathe.

To answer that question, the SS doctors in Buchenwald had sawn off little Franz’s nose.

It turned out it was possible to live without one.

Good to know.

Things had become more difficult for him later on in life. But if someone had sawn off my nose, Arto Söderstedt thought, I probably would have turned to alcohol too.

And then he found it.

A name.

He phoned Stockholm.

Jan-Olov Hultin answered. He said: ‘I was just about to ring you, Arto. You’ve got to go to Weimar.’

Arto Söderstedt simply ignored him.

‘Listen carefully to what I’m about to say,’ he said, focusing on the computer screen in front of him.

‘I’m listening,’ said Hultin.

‘Our man without a nose, “Shtayf” from Södra Begravningsplatsen, was called Franz Kouzmin. That wasn’t his birth name, though. He was born to a Jewish home in Berlin in January 1935. His name was Franz Sheinkman.’

There was silence at the other end of the line.

‘My God,’ said Hultin.

‘You could say that,’ said Söderstedt.

‘Tell me more.’

‘He was a widower and an alcoholic and had just stopped drinking. He crept out of the Soviet Union in good spirits and set off to Sweden, or more precisely to his father Leonard Sheinkman’s house on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö. Somehow, he’d managed to find out where his father was living. It was enough to make him stop drinking. His father thought Franz was dead – dead along with his wife in Buchenwald. But that’s not what happened. He wasn’t killed, he was subjected to medical experiments; they deliberately sawed his nose off. So, on the evening of the fourth of September 1981, he arrived at his father’s house on Bofinksvägen. We don’t know what happened when they met, but what we do know is that the very same evening, he was stabbed to death and found next to a little lake nearby.’

‘I see,’ said Hultin.

‘You see what?’

‘That you’ve done a fantastic job. Can you send the files over? Will they allow that?’

‘I think so,’ Söderstedt said, glancing up at the great Alexej Svitlytjnyj. His cigarette was tiny once more, but Söderstedt was forced to admit that he had lost interest in it.

‘You can go to Weimar now then,’ said Hultin. ‘You need to meet a Professor Ernst Herschel from the history department at the University of Jena. Get there as quickly as you can. We can deal with any further instructions on the way.’

‘Give me a hint,’ Söderstedt pleaded.

‘The institution where the nail in the brain experiment was developed.’

‘Ah,’ Söderstedt replied, hanging up.

Svitlytjnyj sucked the microscopic cigarette butt into his mouth, quickly doused it with a little pooled spit, spat it out and had another immediately ready rolled. He lit it as he leaned forward over the computer and helped Arto Söderstedt navigate the Cyrillic letters on-screen.

And just like that, Franz Kouzmin-Sheinkman’s files were sent flying across Europe.

Söderstedt wondered whether he hadn’t simply been asked to come to Odessa to admire their computers and spread a little goodwill among the Common European police community.

He said: ‘I need to copy the files for my own use, too.’

He was handed a disk and the computer asked him: ‘Save Kouzmin?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. With emphasis.