Europa Blues

30

IT WAS SATURDAY evening in Tuscany. The Söderstedt family were on their veranda, the sun slowly sinking in the distance. Its blushing rays fell among the rows of vines, painting the hills with stripes of golden light. The scent of seventeen different varieties of basil was drifting in from the garden, and the lingering warmth of the day was making the pine-scented evening air quiver slightly in the dusk. The remaining morsels of Anja’s fantastic special pesto, made from her latest green-fingered triumph, a dark opal basil, were being eaten. It was perfect in combination with a full-bodied Brunello.

Everything – absolutely everything – was just great.

Arto Söderstedt glanced around the table. There was a dark-haired addition to the chalk-white family. The dark hair belonged to Giorgio, the seventeen-year-old son of a winemaker who had taken his eldest daughter’s virginity. Mikaela had brought him home one day and introduced him to the family. Arto Söderstedt had thought that was something momentous; it felt like he was being thanked for managing to convince her that she had nothing to be ashamed of. Hopefully, that insight would follow her through life.

In his opinion, people should feel shame only when they did something bad to another person.

Then and only then.

Giorgio was a shy young man, living in the belief that his lover’s father was, by definition, furious. That it was his duty to be furious. But not even Giorgio’s own father seemed particularly angry. They had invited the winemaker and his wife over one evening. Both had seemed nervous, as though standing trial. These were the people whose daughter their good-for-nothing son had penetrated. And so the Söderstedts had mobilised their combined good natures to convince them that everything was fine, and slowly, slowly, the boy’s parents had relaxed. The evening had ended with each of them attempting to surpass the others in their extolment of love and wine and life.

Someone at this table is pregnant.

Thud – the thought suddenly struck Söderstedt.

There was something in the air. That particularly female, utterly silent telepathy sending thoughts right over the table. He had experienced it before. Five times, to be exact. That made him an expert.

His eyes came to rest on Linda first, his second eldest daughter. She was fourteen. There didn’t seem to be any danger there. She was busy wolfing down pasta and glancing wryly around, just like normal. Incredibly interested in Giorgio, above all else. With a smile, he wondered to himself what she was thinking. Where her thoughts were taking her.

Then came the critical moment. He gathered his courage and turned to Mikaela. She was shining. But it was the light of love, nothing else, he was quite convinced of that.

OK, he thought, taking a breather. So I was wrong. I thought I would never be picking children up from day care again, but that isn’t to be. Within a couple of years, I’ll be picking up yet another baby from day care.

He turned to Anja, sitting there proudly tasting her dark opal pesto. She was glowing.

There was, after all, a difference between shining and glowing. A huge difference.

‘So you’re pregnant, are you?’ he asked, taking another sip of wine.

Anja choked on her pesto. He had to get up, rush round the table and put the good old Heimlich manoeuvre into practice. He grabbed her beneath her breasts and squeezed. A huge lump of pesto flew across the table. Giorgio pulled a face. Mikaela was flame-red with embarrassment. She wasn’t done learning yet.

Anja dried her tears with a napkin, which she then used to wipe the pesto from the table. Her face was completely expressionless. She sat down and stared out at the dusky landscape. Arto sat down too. He watched her, waiting for the telepathic waves to return.

Giorgio was looking sceptically at his half-eaten portion of pesto.

‘You don’t have to eat it,’ Anja said, without moving her eyes.

The telepathic waves were absent when Mikaela and Giorgio snuck away from the table to slander the adult world in intimate tones; they were absent when Linda and Peter ran off to creep around in the deepening darkness, frightening the daylights out of one another; they were absent when Stefan took little Lina’s hand and dragged her away to watch Italian kids’ TV.

But once husband and wife were left alone on the veranda, once darkness had fallen, once the fireflies had appeared, flashing like sparks in the night, the telepathic waves returned. Anja’s distant gaze finally vanished and she met his stubbornly penetrating eyes. She sat there for a few seconds, watching her strange husband. Then she shook her head quickly, smiled and disappeared indoors.

Yes, there would be a new baby; there would always be a baby.

He moved over to his particular corner of the veranda and turned on the computer. It rattled and whirred. He lived in constant fear that it would be struck by an information overload and just die completely. All these CD-ROMs being fed into it, all the information spread across its hard drive – where was the limit of what it could withstand?

Arto Söderstedt opened the sketch of Palazzo Riguardo which Commissioner Marconi had, slightly reluctantly, given to him. In addition to that, the good commissioner had, even more reluctantly, pointed out the critical spots of the thirty-four-room building. After that, he had stood with his hands on his hips and said: ‘I should probably know why you want this, Signor Sadestatt.’

Signor Sadestatt had replied: ‘What’s the best way in?’

Naturally, Signor Marconi’s jaw had dropped. Anything else would have been unthinkable.

Söderstedt had explained: ‘Not for me, for the Erinyes.’

Marconi had looked at him. His jaw moved back to its usual position – and with it, his gaze.

‘They can’t get at him anywhere other than at home,’ Söderstedt had continued. ‘He hasn’t left his palazzo in… what did you say? A year?’

Marconi had nodded, mute but not indifferent.

‘And that means they’ve got to get into Palazzo Riguardo if they want to get to him.’

‘And you’re quite sure that these… Erinyes are out for him?’

‘I’m feeling increasingly certain of that, yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the whole thing with the wolverines was so wonderfully clear. Because there’s some sort of direct link between Leonard Sheinkman in Stockholm and Marco di Spinelli in Milan. Because the combination of wolverine and old man points straight to Palazzo Riguardo. Because di Spinelli is the spider in the middle of the web. All points lead to him, and all points lead from him. He’s weaved the web that’s going to end up snaring him. He’s created the figures who are going to eat him up.’

‘That sounds quite convincing,’ Marconi had said encouragingly before throwing a spanner into Söderstedt’s neatly oiled machine. ‘But is there really a single tenable link between Sheinkman and di Spinelli?’

‘He recognised him.’

‘According to you, yes. But all that’s based on a hunch. And if that’s the case, shouldn’t Sheinkman be the victim and di Spinelli the hangman? Why murder both the victim and the executioner?’

‘Nothing is pointing to di Spinelli as the hangman. They might just be brothers in misfortune.’

‘Marco di Spinelli, a prisoner in Buchenwald? You’re kidding.’

‘Your words, Signor Marconi, suggest that you’re of the opposite impression, despite all your earlier neutrality.’

‘Look at Marco di Spinelli, Signor Sadestatt. Does he look like a man plagued by his past in a concentration camp, degraded by the Nazis as they murdered people on an industrial scale? Does he look like a man who now, after fifty years, still needs pills to be able to sleep just an hour a night? Does he look like a man who has been subjected to the most awful of medical experiments?’

Arto Söderstedt had actually been forced to pause for thought there. For an instant, the distinguished commissioner, usually such a marvel of self-restraint, had revealed the basis of his obstinacy.

It was personal.

In one way or another, it was personal.

‘Your father?’ Söderstedt had asked rashly.

‘My entire upbringing,’ Marconi had replied, fixing him with his gaze. ‘My entire childhood in a nutshell. They can’t sleep. They can never sleep.’

Söderstedt had been silent. He had waited for Marconi, who continued with a composed but trembling voice.

‘Buchenwald was Nazi Germany’s biggest concentration camp. Towards the end of the war, there were practically only non-German prisoners there. The German Jews, those who hadn’t been subjected to medical experiments, had already been shipped off to the extermination camps in Poland, and Buchenwald was becoming more and more a camp for foreign prisoners. My father was an Italian Communist. The Nazis, they were studying the movement of blood through muscle mass by watching it… live. Dissection of living right arms. Without anaesthetic, of course. He lived with that dissected, rotting arm hanging at his side for almost a year before units from the 3rd US Army reached Buchenwald on the eleventh of April 1945 and opened the gates.’

Arto Söderstedt had observed him. It was hard to digest.

‘I’m sorry,’ he had said meaninglessly.

‘Me too,’ Marconi had replied, fiddling with various papers on his desk. ‘And so my experience tells me Marco di Spinelli was never held prisoner in a concentration camp. I’d bet my life on it.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ Söderstedt had said. ‘It was just an idea.’

‘Complete your line of reasoning anyway,’ Marconi had replied; he was back to his old self once again.

‘Someone who kills an eighty-eight-year-old concentration camp survivor by hanging him upside down and poking about in his brain with a metal wire is, by definition, a fascist. I think my colleagues in Stockholm assumed a bit too hastily that the Furies were out on some kind of mission. That they’re liberating women who’ve been subjected to violence. I think they actually seem quite fascistic. Even if they are women.’

Marconi had nodded. Then he had said: ‘There’s a way in.’

Arto Söderstedt had watched him as he leaned forward over the drawing of the palazzo they had unrolled on the desk. Only then did Söderstedt start to see just how intricately mapped each of the rooms in the palace were.

‘We really do know every single nook and cranny of Palazzo Riguardo,’ Marconi had continued. ‘It’s from here that the activities which destroy our country and our continent are organised. Marco di Spinelli’s business is, quite simply, market economics in its purest form. An unregulated market economy holed up in a palace where the greatest artists in the West have, over the years, adorned the corridors of power. It’s great, consummate beauty; it’s education; it’s a sense of history – and it’s pure, brutal power.’

Arto Söderstedt was starting to understand why the palace was so well documented. Marconi and his men understood the entire mechanics of the operation – they just couldn’t stop it.

‘The palace was built a bit like an onion,’ Marconi had made a sweeping gesture over the sketch. ‘With the difference that the palace has a heart. The heart is Marco di Spinelli’s office. You have to go through layer after layer to get to it. When the Perduto family built the palace during the sixteenth century, they were facing threats from all directions. The palace was constructed like a series of surrounding walls. It’s not something you notice as you tread its corridors, but the fact is you’re crossing drawbridge after drawbridge, and they can be raised so quickly that you’d fall right down into the moat, if you’ll forgive the metaphor. Despite the fact that the palace seems so open and roomy, there is just one way out of each of the layers, and by each of those doors is a closely watched and quickly raised drawbridge. Trying to make your way through the layers by these doors is pointless. But there’s an alternative route. We call it “the strait gate”.’

Söderstedt had given a short laugh. ‘“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’”

Marconi had given him a quick glance. A fleeting smile had passed over his face, and he had nodded. ‘Matthew, 7:13. It really is narrow, and few have ever found it. It’s the ace up our sleeve. If ever we need to get in there quickly.’

Now, on the veranda, Söderstedt watched Marconi’s digital line snake its way through the palace on the map on his computer screen. It stretched out into the dark Tuscan landscape like the light trails left behind by fireflies. He imagined it was forming some kind of illegible text.

Once Marconi had finished drawing his line, Söderstedt had asked: ‘What do you think Marco di Spinelli did during the war?’

Marconi had put down his pen and stared at his Nordic colleague.

‘It’s obvious,’ he had replied. ‘He was a Nazi.’

As though conjured up by the simile, a cloud of fireflies swarmed into the garden, performing a dance that remained visible long, long after they had disappeared. A magpie’s nest of light which he couldn’t blink away, making it impossible to distinguish Marconi’s narrow gate.

Arto Söderstedt sat there for a good while, staring out into the nothingness and trying to read the fireflies’ writing. He studied it for so long that the text slowly faded before his eyes. Until eventually, only Italo Marconi’s pale line was left. It snaked right across the drawing, like a child’s shaky pencil line through a comic-book labyrinth.

He could imagine how the Erinyes, perhaps even at that very moment, were sat hunched over the exact same drawing, pointing at the exact same line. They were coming, he could feel it. Suddenly, it felt as though the garden began to quiver. From the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow slip behind a tree. Then another. Until all of nature seemed to be awash with shifting shadows, the trees themselves in movement, the forest approaching.

Arto Söderstedt shuddered and tried to shake off his unease.

Who were they, these unrelenting figures from the forgotten depths of mythology?

Civilisation thought it had tamed them a few thousand years earlier.

They crept up on their victims. With great precision, they drove their increasingly petrified prey towards the designated murder scene. When they got there, their victims would be meek, shaken to the very core of their beings. They caused the forgotten, repressed depths to tremble, and then they hung their victims upside down and drove a terrible nail into their brains.

By that point, they had already scared their victims senseless.

All other than Leonard Sheinkman. He had spoken to them. Calmly and quietly.

It was as though he had been waiting for them.

As though he had been waiting for them for a very long time.

As though he had known that, sooner or later, they would be coming.

What had he been waiting for? Was it something he had seen in the concentration camp? Was it his own betrayal, which Paul Hjelm had described after having read his diary? His double betrayal?

Was he waiting for the spirits of his wife and son to seek their vengeance?

No, his betrayal wasn’t of that kind. He could have taken his family and moved to America, of course – not having done so was, in itself, a betrayal of sorts. And of course, he could have protested loudly when his wife and son were slaughtered, but that wouldn’t have made any real difference.

No, this was something else, something worse. On that point, Söderstedt was in complete agreement with Paul. ‘I’ve got a vague feeling there’s something wrong somewhere,’ as he had said on the phone.

And then the second conversation had come.

From Hultin.

‘What do you say about the spookily beautiful Odessa?’

He would be leaving tomorrow. He would be leaving his neglected paradise and entering the wolf’s lair, having to avoid being robbed and shot by aggressive beggars, and having to coax reluctant Eastern European policemen and women without computers into working with him.

It was the choice he had made.

And he didn’t regret it for a second.

He glanced at his watch. It was time. He closed the document containing the drawing of Palazzo Riguardo and changed the CD for another, a newly bought one. He started the installation Wizard and opened a box on the table next to the computer. In the background, the cicadas were singing.

He took out a device that looked like a little flashlight, plugged it into his laptop and attached it to the top of his computer screen.

The installation was complete. He accepted all of its mysterious licence agreements and caught sight of himself on-screen. His face was dark.

He moved the floor lamp from behind him and pointed its beam of light at his face. As he did so, the face on the screen also lit up. For a moment, he thought it was Uncle Pertti he could see, the young Pertti, his hand gripping his sabre. So ludicrously similar to Arto Söderstedt. What was he doing there? A shudder ran through him.

Arto stuck out his tongue. On the computer screen, Uncle Pertti did the same.

The spell was broken.

He returned to his technology. It should all work now.

He got rid of his picture on-screen. It was his and his alone.

As he set up the Internet connection, the insects began to gather around the lone source of light. He could feel that his face was covered with unknown winged insects when a completely different but equally well-known face finally appeared on-screen, and he said:

‘Hello, wage labourers.’