Europa Blues

37

ARTO SÖDERSTEDT WAS wearing sturdy climbing shoes and a thick jumper with reinforced elbows. In addition to that, he had on a pair of military-green trousers with a large number of pockets.

He had checked in to a hotel in the immediate vicinity of Palazzo Riguardo. Now he was sitting in his room, looking at his watch. 4 a.m. He set out into the Milanese night.

Outside, the sky was black. The people of Milan were still enjoying their beauty sleep. He could hear no more than a car or two in the distance. The stars were gleaming from the depths of the heavens; the moon was nothing more than a thin slice.

He crossed a small park and found himself at the end of an alleyway. On one side, the smooth outer wall of a building. On the other, the rear of Palazzo Riguardo, its few solitary windows set high up in the wall.

Söderstedt could see a circular vent with a heavy-looking cover. It was sunk into the thick pink wall of the building.

He watched the two surveillance cameras slowly, slowly rotating on their axes. He waited.

When the cameras reached the outermost points of their motions, he rushed into the alleyway and pressed himself up against the wall opposite the palace. He glanced at his watch and waited. The cameras turned and began to move back, each turning in a different direction.

The key dangling from his hand was trembling slightly.

His eyes were fixed on his watch. Four, three, two, one.

Zero.

He ran. Straight over the alleyway. Key quickly into lock. Vent lid quickly opened. And in he jumped. Into the unknown.

He heard the lid slam shut in the alleyway as he was transported into the palace through a pitch-black, downward shaft. Then he landed in a container with a bang.

He was surrounded by a terrible stench. Rotting fish. He couldn’t see a thing and the air seemed thin. He lay on the rubbish like a shapeless lump, desperately trying to breathe calmly. He put the key into a pocket which he fastened shut with Velcro. He groped after another pocket and made out the contours of the small pistol he had found in the envelope from Marconi. ‘A purely hypothetical pistol, I assume,’ Söderstedt had said. He let go of it and allowed his hand to wander to yet another pocket. He pulled a small torch out of it and switched it on.

He really was lying on a pile of rubbish. Ants were running back and forth over the remnants of old fish. A couple of small, black worms were wriggling in and out of the eye sockets of a fish head. He could feel a rising wave of nausea he simply had to force back. He had no alternative.

He pointed the bright beam of light up at the roof of the rubbish container. Sure enough, he could make out the mouths of four chutes, each around half a metre in diameter. He found the shaft he had come in through. It was behind him. Slowly, he got to his feet. He could stand, provided he hunched right over. He moved past the first of the chutes in the left-hand corner of the container. At the second, he paused and put his head into the hole. He grabbed the torch and shone it upwards.

The chute turned into a shaft which sloped off to one side at an angle of sixty or so degrees. Beyond that, he could see that it turned sharply upwards. From there, it would be a seven-metre vertical climb.

He just hoped no one would throw anything out from the little kitchenette at four in the morning.

On the other hand, someone might hear him.

The chute was made from metal, probably some kind of aluminium alloy. Any careless movements would, in all probability, echo quite well, even if the pipe was flush against the thick stone walls, dampening the sound.

He also realised that he stank.

They would be able to smell him from a mile away.

Marconi: ‘Try to take a complete change of clothes. Choose trousers with as many pockets as possible. Purely theoretically, of course.’

Getting from the container into the chute would be the most difficult thing. Standing with his head inside its mouth, he was up to his shoulders. That meant he needed to jump as high as he could, lock himself into place, get a firm grip with the reinforced elbows and wriggle his way up until he could get a grip with his feet. The angle of the pipe made it slightly easier.

He jumped and locked himself into place. He got a grip with his elbows and wriggled up so that his feet were in place. It worked.

Now he was stuck in the slanting part of the shaft. He shone the torch up, ahead of him. Even this short stretch of pipe felt endless. He had to preserve his strength. He would need it for the vertical climb.

This was simply a prelude.

It took time. He inched slowly, slowly upwards. He knew he was using more energy than he should.

It took him almost fifteen minutes to move those eight or so metres. Once he made it, he sat down in the bend where the chute became vertical and caught his breath. He opened yet another of the pockets in his trousers and pulled out an energy drink. He guzzled it down, shoved it back into his pocket and waited for his breathing to calm down. He felt the energy from the drink reach his bloodstream and his powers were restored.

He shone his torch upwards in the vertical shaft. A huge number of metres above him, seven hundred or so, it looked like, the chute bent once more and continued upwards at a slant.

The final furlong.

He started to haul himself upwards. It was hard work, but he soon found a rhythm to it. He was hitting the sides hard, but despite his efforts, he wasn’t making much noise. In the midst of the crossfire of his quick, echoing breaths, he paused to feel pleased that he wasn’t making more noise.

That was when the bag of rubbish suddenly appeared.

He heard the lid of the rubbish chute opening above him, so he was ready. He held his breath and pushed against the walls with all the force he could muster. He waited as the noise grew louder and louder. He strained his neck muscles as hard as he could. And then the bag hit him on the head with a clang.

He could smell the stench.

Leftover shellfish.

Despite the unfortunate circumstances, he managed to think. He didn’t want to let the bag move past his head in case it got stuck somewhere next to his face or chest. It would be better to take it up with him, on his head, and then try to get rid of it when he got to the bend. A bend automatically meant more room.

And so he climbed the last three metres with the bag of rubbish on his head like some African woman balancing a barrel of water.

Sure enough, when he came to the bend, he managed to coax the bag down. He wedged himself into the bend with his feet pressed against the vertical wall and held the bag over the abyss.

Did he dare drop it? If they heard it fall now, several minutes after they threw it away, it was bound to catch their attention. But on the other hand, he was quite deep within the walls of the building.

He let it go. It didn’t make much noise on its way down to the container.

He swung the torch upwards. Again, the chute was slanting, this time close to seventy degrees. Six or so metres up along the shaft, he could make out the inside of the cover. Only a few minutes ago, it had opened. If it opened again, he would be discovered; they would shoot him and he would fall down into the container like any other piece of rubbish.

They might have managed to fill another bag by this point.

But on the other hand, there wasn’t really any going back.

He struggled on, inch by inch. The elbows on his jumper had started to wear away and he could feel the rough stone walls clawing greedily at his increasingly bare skin.

He was so high up now that he could see the lid without straining his neck. He opened the Velcro on the pocket containing the gun. How quickly would he be able to whip it out? he wondered. Without losing his grip and falling headlong into the shaft.

Inch by inch, centimetre by centimetre, closer, closer, closer. His elbows were skinned. He could feel the blood oozing out. And still he continued, inch by inch, centimetre by centimetre, until he reached the lid.

He carefully placed his fingertips on the metal, grabbed a monkey wrench from yet another pocket and clamped it to the inside of the handle mechanism with as much delicacy as he could. His hands were shaking. For a few seconds, they caused the wrench to rattle gently against the handle. Then it was in place.

He took a deep breath and held the monkey wrench utterly, utterly still.

Slowly, he began turning it anticlockwise.

As he turned it, he thought of the consequences. Just fifteen minutes earlier, someone had been here and thrown a bag of rubbish down the chute. How did he know that person wasn’t still on the other side of the wall? It was true, he couldn’t hear a sound from inside the palace, but it would have been enough if di Spinelli was in his love nest – the room next to the kitchenette. It wasn’t his usual bedroom, but maybe he’d had a prostitute there overnight. They might have been eating lobster and drinking champagne. He was just grateful it hadn’t been a champagne bottle landing on his head.

He need not have worried.

He opened the lid a fraction of an inch. He could see the outlines of an oven and a stove. Otherwise, nothing.

Suddenly, the lid was torn open and the barrel of a high-calibre gun was jammed into his mouth. The light in the kitchenette came on, blinding him. He was hauled up out of the chute and thrown down to the floor.

‘New cologne?’ Marco di Spinelli asked.

Someone kicked Söderstedt in the stomach before lifting him up by his hair and throwing him onto a chair. The three bodyguards were standing in a ring around him. One of them shoved his high-calibre pistol into Söderstedt’s mouth once more. He thought: Then, back then, when the phone rang in that restaurant on Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence, back then everything had been possible. Then, back then, when the wine had been flowing and he was enjoying the spring breeze as he looked out over the Arno and the whole of Florence was like a man-made paradise in front of him, right then it would have been possible to ignore the phone.

If he had done that, his paradise would still be intact.

A bit boring, perhaps, but boring in a paradisiacal way.

The pistol was yanked out of his mouth. Against the wall behind the bodyguards, Marco di Spinelli was standing, straight-backed. Ninety-two years old and still convinced of the superiority of his genes.

‘The bag of rubbish was a nice touch, wasn’t it?’ he said, wrinkling his nose. ‘You really do not smell good, Signor Sadestatt.’

One of the bodyguards took Söderstedt’s little pistol and handed it over to di Spinelli, who looked at it with interest.

‘One of those guns the police tend to use when they’re avoiding looking like they’re policemen. For some reason, they’re always the same.’ He handed the gun back to the bodyguard and said, nonchalantly: ‘I suppose it was in the envelope.’

Arto Söderstedt closed his eyes and understood. He could feel the blood running from his mouth and wondered how many teeth he was missing.

And he realised, with a chilling clarity, that he would never get to meet his new baby.

‘You must understand,’ di Spinelli said, ‘that we’ve been filming that irritatingly incorruptible Marconi for years. We followed you to Odessa and to Leipzig and to Weimar and back. You might have hurt yourself.’

‘Hans von Heilberg,’ Söderstedt hissed.

‘Yes, yes,’ di Spinelli replied disinterestedly. ‘But Marconi was right that you did manage to surprise me on your first visit. I’d seen the film from Marconi’s office, of course, but you were sitting with your back to the camera so I hadn’t seen your face. It surprised me. You also seemed unusually mediocre. Then I realised it was a mask. You weren’t unusually mediocre, just mediocre. In a way, that was worse.’

‘And the Erinyes?’ Söderstedt panted.

‘Eastern European competition,’ di Spinelli replied with a shrug. ‘We have plenty of that these days, but it isn’t especially difficult for us to deal with. We’ll pick them up soon enough. They usually lose patience. But there’s one matter from earlier that we need to straighten out, Signor Sadestatt.’

‘How is it I’m so similar to Pertti Lindrot, the SS doctor from the Pain Centre in Weimar?’

‘Yes, how?’

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ Söderstedt said. ‘They’re dead, both of them. Pertti Lindrot devoted his life to drinking himself stupid. Anton Eriksson became a Jewish professor and met his end hanging upside down with a metal nail in his brain.’

‘Well, what do you know,’ said di Spinelli. ‘But you haven’t answered the question.’

‘I have no intention of doing so either,’ Söderstedt replied.

Suddenly, he felt a kind of shifting presence in the palace. He grinned.

‘In that case, it’s time to relive some old memories,’ Hans von Heilberg said, picking up a small box, not dissimilar to the kind you would keep expensive old jewellery in. ‘Of great value to the right collector,’ he said, removing a long, thin, sharp metal nail from the box. He bent it slightly, like a master fencer bends his rapier before each bout.

Then, suddenly, his three gorillas died.

The nail pinged back and Marco di Spinelli looked down at his three dead lumps of meat in surprise.

Something rushed by the door out towards the love nest. Like an illusion. It was completely empty back there. All he had noticed was a faint movement.

‘You move quickly, Magda,’ Söderstedt said into the nothingness.

The room remained silent and empty. Marco di Spinelli stared towards the mute darkness in the room where, for years, he had received prostitutes. Perhaps there was a glimmer of fear in his steely eyes. He grabbed one of his gorillas’ pistols and crept slowly over towards the love nest. He disappeared round the corner.

Söderstedt heard him.

He heard him die.

He didn’t scream, that would have been beneath him, but he gave out a wheeze, and that wheeze declared that he had lived too long.

Much too long.

He was dangling from the crystal chandelier in his exquisite office, hanging there like a modern work of art alongside Leonardo and Piero della Francesca’s masterpieces and the sixteenth-century tapestries. The faint moonlight was shining in through the window by which the Marquis of Perduto had composed his famous sonnets to Amelia, the girl he had met at the age of eight and never quite managed to forget.

Arto Söderstedt stood alongside him. The little pistol hung from his hand in the same way as Marco di Spinelli hung from his perfect chandelier. Both dangled. There was nothing for Söderstedt to aim his gun at. The room was empty. Elsewhere in the palace, the guards sat playing cards. They were blissfully unaware they were now unemployed.

He squatted down to look at Hans von Heilberg’s face. Just like the way in which the man himself had looked at the hundreds of victims whose dental gold had formed the basis of his financial activities in Milan. Activities which, in turn, laid the basis for his criminal empire.

Everything went hand in hand.

Hans von Heilberg’s shirt collar had been ripped back. A purple, rhombus-shaped birthmark shone dark against his pale skin.

From his temple, a long, sharp, stiff nail. The steely look in his eyes had been obliterated by the pain.

Time was slowly righting itself once more.

‘Are you there, Magda?’ Söderstedt asked, looking at di Spinelli’s glassy, lifeless eyes.

A faint shifting behind his back confirmed that she was.

They all were.

But when he turned round, he couldn’t see a soul.

He smiled.

And then he said, to the room, straight into the incomprehensible: ‘Thank you.’