The Blinded Man aka Misterioso

16

All during breakfast Paul Hjelm’s attention was focused on the cell phone that lay like a defective slab of cheese among the others on the kitchen table. Even though he didn’t take his eyes off it even once, he could feel the annoyed glances that Cilla directed at him, only to be dismissed over and over again. Finally her gaze grew so sharp that he was forced to look up.

“Maybe he hasn’t been found yet,” he said, his thoughts still on the cell phone.

But the look on her face wasn’t her usual give-me-some-attention-too expression. It had been transformed into something else, something he’d never seen before. A strangely lonely expression, a look of final surrender. So desolate. He was totally bewildered. A feeling rushed through him, the same one that had stunned him as he listened to Kerstin Holm’s cassette tapes: the dreadful, unbearable feeling that we can never really reach anyone else. Never ever, not even those closest to us.

The horrifying sensation of absolute existential loneliness.

And now he saw this same emotion in Cilla’s eyes.

For a brief second they were paradoxically united by this overwhelming emotion.

When they finally managed to speak, they were both fully aware that what they said had nothing to do with what they really wanted to say. For that there were no words.

There at the kitchen table, on that ordinary morning, they shared, while being unable to communicate it in any way, an almost mystical experience that their very language was assigning them roles that they would never be able to escape.

Did those few minutes in the kitchen draw them closer together? Or had a final chasm opened up between them? It was impossible to say, but something decisive had taken place; they had looked right into each other’s naked loneliness.

And perhaps that was the most shocking development during that whole eventful week.

Nothing else happened. His cell phone didn’t ring once during the drive over to police headquarters, but Hjelm didn’t care. For the other members of the A-Unit, the day passed in an intensity of waiting, but the murder victim remained conspicuously absent, and Hjelm still didn’t care. The investigation seemed paralyzed by the broken pattern, and Hjelm was paralyzed too, in his utterly personal, utterly lonely way. Toward the end of the day Hultin tried to normalize the group’s mood as they all gathered around the table in Supreme Central Command.

“All right then,” he said calmly. “If there’s no undiscovered victim lying in some monumental living room somewhere in the city, then we have to accept that we’re faced with two possibilities. One: for some reason the perp has changed his M.O.; or two: it’s over.”

Paul Hjelm didn’t hear what he said. He stayed sitting there until the others had gone home. All alone in Supreme Central Command, he wondered what he was going to find when he arrived home.

But what he came home to was a reasonably normal family life. The looks that he and Cilla exchanged would never be the same, and he never stopped wondering whether the return to normal was artificial, whether it might contain a ticking time bomb. Nevertheless, he regained a foothold on life after that strange day spent teetering on the edge of the void, even though he continued to wonder what sort of ground he was actually standing on, and his interest in the case rose back to normal levels.

But nothing new came to light. The case returned to normal, just as his life did. But in neither instance did the ground feel entirely trustworthy.

Almost a week after the first murder, Paul Hjelm, for once, was having lunch in the cafeteria at police headquarters. He was notorious for skipping lunch. But for once the whole core group was present at the same time: Söderstedt, Chavez, Norlander, Holm, Nyberg. The six of them formed a closed unit at one long table, and if they’d had the slightest tendency toward paranoia, they would have thought they were surrounded by hostile faces.

They did think they were surrounded by hostile faces.

“So here’s the thing,” said Söderstedt resolutely, rubbing his white cheek that showed almost no sign of stubble. In one hand he held a forkful of gristly and fatty beef stew, dripping with gravy. “The Stockholm detectives hate us because we took the case away from them. The national cops hate us because Hultin chose a bunch of low-ranking outsiders for one of the most important investigations in the history of Swedish crime. And they all hate us because we’re deviants: a pale Finn, a blackhead, a west coaster, a fifth columnist, a Goliath meat mountain, and a media hero.”

“Fifth columnist?” said Viggo Norlander sullenly.

“So you recognized your place in the terrarium?”

“I’ve never betrayed the Stockholm detectives, and I never will.”

“You know what they say,” said Hjelm, hating the bite of stew that he had just put in his mouth. “Once you become part of the NCP, you never get out. Except in an appropriate casket.”

“Who the hell said that?” said Chavez.

“I don’t remember,” said Hjelm, surreptitiously spitting a lump of fat into his napkin.

Chavez turned to Söderstedt. “How’s it going with the apartment, Ärtan?”

Ärtan? A nickname? Hjelm suddenly realized that he had missed out on a lot. When the hell did they have time for personal conversations?

He looked around. The time they’d spent together had been strictly of a professional nature. Who were these people really, with whom he was spending such obscenely long workdays? Again a chill rushed through him, from the cassette tapes and from his own kitchen in Norsborg: no one could ever understand anyone else. Way off in the distance he caught a glimpse, for the briefest moment, of Grundström.

He gave himself a shake.

So how was the camaraderie now? The work pace had slacked off a bit, and he could see the members of the A-Unit as something other than cogs in the machine.

Jorge Chavez was a pleasant colleague; they worked well together. An ultraprofessional, modern police officer, well dressed in a sporty sort of way, solid, and above all young. If time allowed, Hjelm should be able to establish strong teamwork with him. Although from a personal point of view, they might be too different. Hjelm knew only that Jorge was single and that he’d recently moved out of one of the apartments available for temporary lodgings at police headquarters. He’d said nothing about his tenure with the Sundsvall police force. All Hjelm’s attempts to find anything out had fallen flat. He got the feeling that it had been a nightmarish period that Chavez preferred to forget. Sometimes Chavez seemed to think he’d landed in paradise.

Who else? Gunnar Nyberg, the former Mr. Sweden and bass singer in the Nacka Church choir, had almost become a friend. At any rate, they carpooled together. Hjelm liked that word; it made him happy. But when it came right down to it, he really didn’t know Nyberg either. Divorced after abusing his wife while taking steroids-wasn’t that how all the hints could be interpreted? And he hadn’t seen his children since they were very young. In reality, Nyberg lived for his singing. But in his own way he was also an exceptionally effective police officer, a model of potential assault and battery.

Viggo Norlander was someone Hjelm couldn’t get a handle on. A real stickler for detail, very old school. An arch-Stock-holmer. Seemed to like rules and regulations. Believed in the law books the way religious people believed in the Bible. Wore suits that had been elegant twenty years earlier but now merely smelled of dust and sweat. Tall but with a slightly sluggish body. Unattached. Getting a bit paunchy. Hard to get to know. Maybe there wasn’t anything inside to know.

And then there was Kerstin Holm. He couldn’t ignore the attraction. In many ways she was Cilla’s opposite. Everything dark: dark eyes, dark hair, dark clothes. An incredible… well, integrity. Enormously professional-he couldn’t stop thinking about the finesse with which she had carried out the interviews on the tapes; her conversation with Anna-Clara Hummelstrand in France ought to be in a textbook. Holm was staying with a relative in Stockholm and refused as staunchly as Chavez to talk about her past. From what Hjelm could understand, something had happened over there in Göteborg, something unpleasant that was not to be mentioned. Sooner or later it would be mentioned. He gave her a furtive glance. A fabulous woman.

And then Söderstedt. Arto Söderstedt. A unique specimen. Hjelm had never seen a police officer like him. The pale Finn, as he candidly called himself, was a special creation. Hjelm couldn’t quite get it into his head that Söderstedt was a police officer. Not that he was unprofessional in any way; on the contrary. But he acted and talked more like a… well, an intellectual, a fearless academic, daring to voice his political opinions boldly in the middle of their meetings.

Just as Hjelm was thinking about it, Söderstedt replied to Chavez’s question, although it was hard to remember what the question had been.

“I wouldn’t exactly call it an apartment, but it’s close by. On Agnegatan, in fact. A one-room place with a kitchen in an alcove, while my whole family is back in Västerås. I have five children,” he added, looking at Hjelm.

Hjelm’s feeling of being out of the loop soared to astronomical heights. He pushed it aside.

“Five?” he exclaimed, thinking that his voice sounded convincing. “Is Västerås really that boring?”

“Oh, yes. But two of them were conceived in Vasa.”

“You were working in Finland? How was that?”

“No, well, I wasn’t… a police officer back then. I became a cop rather late in life. Some people think I never should have joined the force.”

Hjelm felt a bit smug about his intuition. He tried to interpret the mood around the table. Maybe Söderstedt meant some colleague in Västerås had criticized him, or maybe he meant someone sitting at the table. It was impossible to tell. Hjelm had a vague impression that he was the only one who didn’t know what Söderstedt was referring to. But it turned out that he needn’t have taxed his brain over the subject.

“All I said was that you don’t need to give a campaign speech for the Communists,” Viggo Norlander muttered testily. The fork he was holding started to shake.

“No, that wasn’t all you said.” Söderstedt fixed his eyes on Norlander.

“Okay, boys,” Kerstin Holm said suddenly.

Norlander slammed his fork down on the tray and rose, carrying it away without another word. Even in that state of monumental anger, he felt compelled to put the tray in its proper place on the rack, crumple up his napkin, and toss it into the proper wastebasket.

Hjelm glanced around the staff cafeteria. A few openly sarcastic smiles came from the neighboring tables. He smiled grimly.

To be an outsider even among the outsiders.

Right in the eye of the storm.

Holm said to Söderstedt, “Cut that out. We have other things to do than pick fights in the sandbox.”

“He socked me right in the jaw,” muttered Söderstedt sullenly. For a second, a bucket and shovel might have been visible in his hands. When they disappeared, he went on: “And then he dragged in the whole foreigner thing. Except for the blackhead, of course.” Söderstedt ran his hand over his thin, chalk-white hair.

Hjelm laughed. He didn’t know why, but Nyberg joined in. Söderstedt also chuckled a bit. Holm smiled that ironic smile of hers, as did Chavez. The peace pipe went around the whole group.

“To exclude the political aspects of this case would be like working on only half a case,” said Söderstedt at last. “Come on, give me some support, somebody!”

“I agree,” said Chavez. “But there are different ways to handle it. To back up a bit, what exactly happened in Vasa?”

“Oh no. No, no,” said Söderstedt, laughing. “We’re not on those kinds of personal terms yet. How’s it going with your hole in the wall, by the way?”

“Mine is definitely not an apartment. Just a room rented from an old woman at the intersection of Bergsgatan and Scheelegatan. Like when I was in training.”

“So what about you, Kerstin?” asked Söderstedt. “Where are you staying, my dear?”

“With my ex-husband’s second ex-wife in Brandbergen,” said Holm. “We get on well together. We share an identical and highly productive hatred.”

More laughter, about everything and nothing. About the fact that they had taken a small step closer to each other. About the fact that nobody had been murdered in several days. About themselves and their absurd situation at police headquarters.

Nyberg left, followed by Chavez and Söderstedt. Holm finished her light beer and was about to get up when Hjelm said, “Kerstin. Did you get hold of George Hummelstrand?”

She sank back down onto her chair, giving him a surly look. “I really didn’t like the fact that you took credit for the Hummelstrand lead,” she said.

“I’ve already apologized. Besides, it’s not really a matter of taking credit, is it? I was still on the track of the Mimir lead. I’ll apologize again, if that’s what you want. And again. And again.”

A reluctant smile appeared on her disturbingly beautiful face.

“And again,” he said, feeling rather pleased. “So. How did it go with George?”

The smile abruptly vanished. Her dark eyes seemed to X-ray right through him. “Are you happily married?” she asked.

“What?” he said. For a moment Cilla’s desolate expression obscured his field of vision.

“Happily married?” said Kerstin Holm with the utmost seriousness. “Really happily?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know who you are,” she said inscrutably, and got up and left.

The image of Cilla slowly faded.

Finally the whole world went pale.