The Blinded Man aka Misterioso

21

“Misterioso” was playing on the door speakers, over and over, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Did you guys get any sleep last night?” asked Jorge Chavez.

They were sitting in Hjelm’s unmarked Mazda. Hjelm was driving, and Holm was sitting next to him, playing the Thelonious Monk piece nonstop on the car stereo. Chavez was just as constantly popping up from the backseat.

Hjelm and Holm replied only with slight movements of their heavy eyelids, which were trying to stay open but also keep out the relentless glare of the summerlike sunshine. An impossible task.

It was May 18.

“Monk would turn over in his grave if he knew that his marvelous music had inspired someone to commit a series of murders,” Chavez went on, not sounding particularly sad. They were on the trail. At last.

Again he received no answer from the front seat. That neither stopped him nor annoyed him.

“I went over to headquarters last night, to look at the members of the boards of directors again. Intensive computer work. There are four ways to proceed from here. The most interesting is Sydbanken. All four men were actually on the board at the same time for a brief period in 1990. On the whole, that’s really the most promising lead. But maybe it’s even more interesting that Enar Brandberg was on the Lovisedal board at the same time as both Daggfeldt and Carlberger in 1991, the same media conglomerate that’s having problems with Viktor X’s protection racket today-GrimeBear, you sleepyheads. Assuming, of course, that Strand-Julén was a red herring. On the other hand, if our murderer has presented us with a red herring at this late date by killing Brandberg, then Ericsson and MEMAB will still have to be under consideration.”

Still no answer.

And once again it had no effect on Chavez’s enthusiasm. “I’m sure that Hultin is right, that one of these corporations is the key to the whole mystery.”

The car stopped for a red light.

“Turn at the OK gas station,” said Chavez. “On Rinkeby Allé. We can park where it dead-ends and walk across the square. I need to buy some fresh garlic.”

Hjelm drove down the avenue and parked the car. “You seem a little hyper,” he said.

“The only way to stay awake,” Chavez said.

They crossed the lively square in the summery sunshine. The vendors’ stalls were bursting with vegetables and fruits of all sizes and types, seldom seen in ordinary grocery stores. Hjelm thought about the ban on pesticides in vegetables from abroad, compared to the Swedish ones. He felt gray and dreary in the midst of the bustling, colorful crowds.

Chavez bought a bulb of fresh garlic and waved it in front of Hjelm’s face. “Begone, you blasphemer, Nosferatu.”

Hjelm, who felt as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet, climbed out of his coffin with a foolish grin.

They walked a few blocks to the heart of the Rinkeby district. Half a flight down, in one of the buildings that all looked the same, was a small shop with no visible signage but extremely dusty windows. The shop turned out to be much larger than expected, and it was packed. People of all races were looking through the endless rows of CDs, containing music from every corner of the globe. A group of teenage boys of various colors, united by their baggy clothes and their baseball caps turned backward, occupied the big hip-hop corner. And at the very back, behind the counter, sat a dark South American in his fifties, filing his nails.

“Alberto!” exclaimed Chavez, going over to hug the man, who stood up and proved to be gigantic.

“Jorge, Jorge,” said the man after they’d embraced for at least thirty seconds, then spoke rapidly in Spanish. Hjelm was able to catch the name “Skövde,” to which Jorge answered, “No, no, Sundsvall.” Chavez pointed at his colleagues. Kerstin Holm had just dipped into a stack of Gregorian chants; she said a few words in her slightly faltering Spanish. Alberto laughed loudly. Hjelm smiled at him, noticing that the shop smelled of incense. A stick of it was smoldering in a pot of dried flowers on the counter.

“Come with me,” Alberto said to Hjelm and Holm, then continued in broken but essentially correct Swedish, “Let’s go into my inner sanctum.”

They entered a small, dimly lit room. An exquisite stereo system occupied the absolute center of the space.

“Do you know that Jorge is one of this country’s finest Swedish-Chilean jazz bassists?” said Alberto from the dark.

“!Esto con chorradas!” cried Chavez merrily, stepping inside.

“Yes, that’s true, that’s true,” laughed Alberto loudly. “May I borrow the tape?”

Holm was the last to enter the room, holding three CDs in her hand. She pulled the tape out of her bag.

“Do you dare leave the shop unattended like this?” she asked as she handed it over.

“Nobody steals from me,” said Alberto ominously, sticking the tape in the player. It started playing toward the end of “Misterioso.” “Really poor quality,” he continued. “Copied two or even three times, I’d guess. Not from any CD. And there aren’t any typical LP clicks either. The original is probably a classic fifties reel-to-reel tape.”

“Here it comes,” said Chavez as the applause and cheering began. Then came the wild improvisations.

Alberto’s face lit up in the dark. “Aaaahhhh,” he said, then uttered an excited flood of Spanish.

“Speak Swedish,” said Chavez.

“Sorry. Of course. This is very, very rare. Even I don’t have a copy. Wait a sec. Let me listen to the whole thing.”

For three minutes, hardly more than that, the chaos continued. Toward the end the playing seemed less chaotic. It was as if the musicians had jointly found a form or shaped a form. It was highly remarkable; even Hjelm could hear the themes looping and passages meeting and combining and melding. Three very strange minutes had passed.

Alberto cleared his throat and stopped the tape.

“ ‘Misterioso,’ taped by the producer and Monk fanatic Orrin Keepnews and the technician Ray Fowler on that magic night, August 7, 1958, at the Five Spot Café in New York. On the CD, after Monk died, Keepnews added a couple of numbers that they’d rejected from the earlier Riverside taping on July 9. They’re not included on this tape.

“This must be the thing I’ve heard people talk about but never actually heard before. It seems that this snippet ended up on the tape because Ray Fowler was drunk and fell asleep when he should have turned off the tape recorder. But that might be a myth. This improvisation was given a name afterward: ‘Risky.’ That’s what it’s called. Arriesgado, Jorge! Neither Keepnews nor Monk wanted to include it on the album, and it’s not on the collectors’ edition either, The Complete Riverside Recordings. It was magical when it was born, but it died soon afterward, or so they thought. As you can hear, that wasn’t the case. Somebody dragged this out of a deep cellar vault and copied it.”

“You’ve heard people talk about it?” said Hjelm. “When, where, how?”

“I had an offer to purchase a copy sometime in the mid-eighties. By an American jazz musician living in Sweden. But he wanted a thousand dollars. I didn’t go for it.”

“Who was he?” asked Chavez.

“You know him, Jorge. You almost played with him a couple of years ago. Jim Barth Richards.”

“The tenor man?”

“Exactly. White Jim. The whitest skin I’ve ever seen on a jazz musician. A little like Johnny Winter. He stayed here in Sweden. Better treatment here, as he said when we met a year or two ago. He has to go into detox practically every other month. Then he can play again. I don’t know whether he’s playing anywhere right now or if he’s in rehab.”

They thanked Alberto, got the tape back, and were heading toward the door.

Alberto said from the dark, “A copy in exchange for those CDs.”

Kerstin Holm glanced down at the Gregorian CDs in her hand. She had forgotten all about them.

“How long will it take?” asked Chavez, just as Hjelm was about to object.

Alberto laughed and punched a button to open the second cassette door. He took out a tape.

“Already done,” he said with a big smile.

Jim Barth Richards did, in fact, have the whitest skin that Hjelm had ever seen. They were lucky enough to find him relatively sober, in a crappy one-room apartment in Gamla Stan that suited his persona. He was in his fifties, and his hair was as white as his complexion. He was sprawled out flat on a mattress on the floor, wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

“I’m sure you’ve heard of the new jazz schools in the States,” said Chavez. “The anti-self-destructive movement. The Marsalis brothers and some even more radical young guys. Don’t you think it’s about time to put this outsider myth on the shelf?”

“Traditionalists!” spat White Jim, in his American-accented Swedish. “They think they can create music by cramming down the whole fucking history of jazz. As if it were a school subject. Where does your fucking pain come from! Books? Fucking mama’s boys! Those who talk don’t know, those who know don’t talk.”

Hjelm and Holm exchanged quick glances.

“They create something new by knowing about everything,” Chavez insisted. “That’s not so damned strange. They’re familiar with every riff, every little passage, every damn run in the history of jazz. That’s where they get all the power and all the pain they need. They can build on your conquests without having to repeat your mistakes. It’s a whole new way of relating to art.”

“It’s an ancient way of relating to art!” said Richards, barely keeping his fury in check. “One that we’ve finally managed to escape. And now they want to go back to the whole damned era of repetitions. I’m glad you never got to play with me, Jorge.”

“You’re the ones who are repeating yourselves, precisely because you don’t know your own history. You think you’re creating something new just because you’re too drugged out to notice that you’ve done it all before. The personally unique expression is one long, damned repetition, the worst kind of self-delusion. The only way to really create something new is to become familiar with everything that has already been done. Then you can talk about a new beginning. The dawn of history again, but a dawn that contains within it all previous dawns.”

“Theoretical bullshit,” said White Jim, boiling over. “All the pain comes from in here!” He slapped his bony chest, where every rib was visible through the dirty T-shirt. The slap produced a disquieting echo. “You can never replace direct feeling!”

“That’s exactly the point!” shouted Jorge, beginning to pace in the filthy apartment. “There’s no direct outlet from in here. That’s not where you get it from. The pain always has to take a path through various forms. It’s just that you don’t see it. You mistake the fog of drugs for emotion and try to invent the wheel over and over again, and each time you think you’ve done it. Authentic bullshit!”

Hjelm was starting to get worried that they might lose White Jim before they even reached him. There seemed to be a high risk that they’d get thrown out at any moment. But instead, Richards sat up, uttered a loud bellow of laughter, and patted the palm of his hand on the mattress.

“Sit down, for God’s sake!”

Jorge sat down, accepted the bottle of Jack Daniels that White Jim had conjured up from somewhere, and took a big gulp.

“You should have gone in for music,” said White Jim. “Instead of all that.” He pointed at Holm and Hjelm. “You take it seriously.”

“Those two know more about music than you do,” said Chavez. They both laughed for a long time. Hjelm understood very little. Kerstin Holm said calmly, “For example, we know about a tape of a little improvisation called ‘Risky,’ played by Monk, Griffin, Malik, and Haynes, which you tried to peddle ten years ago.”

White Jim looked at her in astonishment. Then he roared with laughter. “Quite a long investigation, I must say. But all the priorities in the right places. Three cops come after an old sax has-been for a triviality. I’m deeply honored, people!”

“We’re not here to arrest you. We just want to know who your customers were.”

“Not many people actually bought a copy, you know. When Red Mitchell brought me here in the mid-seventies, I’d heard that you were a small country up by the Arctic Ocean and that you loved jazz. So I made as many copies as I could of that session, plus a number of other original tapes that Griffin had turned me on to in the early sixties. I was playing a lot with Johnny back then, you know, young and green and enthusiastic. He told me there was a lot of unreleased material from the Five Spot period, like ‘ ’Round Midnight’ and ‘Evidence’ and ‘Risky’ and plenty of other motherfucking tunes. Most of them have been released by now, when… what’s his name? The producer? Keepnews. When he needed cash.

“But ‘Risky’ and a few others are my babies. They haven’t been released. So yes, goddamn it, I brought ten different tapes like that from the States, and every once in a while I tried to sell them. This ‘Risky’ tape was one of the last, sometime in ’85 or ’86. By then I knew who my customers were. There were only three; nobody else was willing to hand over big money for semi-lousy pirated recordings. It was fucking illegal, you know. I had no rights to them at all. I still have a couple of tapes left, by the way. For my retirement.”

“Do you still have the addresses of the people who bought copies of the ‘Risky’ tape?” Holm asked doggedly.

“Sure. Since the beginning of the eighties, the buyers have always been the same people. Jazz lovers, maybe. Lovers of rare items, absolutely. If you’re not planning to arrest them, I’ll give you the addresses. Two in Stockholm and one in Växjö. Somewhere I’ve got a little fucking yellow notebook…”

They searched through Richards’s disgusting mess of an apartment, casting aside the most astonishing objects: the dried head of a boa constrictor that turned to dust in Hjelm’s hands, filthy clothing, a shoebox containing Polish zloty bills, more dirty clothes, antiquated Finnish porn magazines with black patches hiding the genitals, still more dirty clothes, a number of throwing knives from Botswana, another huge pile of dirty clothes, thirteen unwashed Guinness beer tankards that had been scattered around, an LP with no album cover but with Bill Evans’s autograph etched across the tracks, and thick stacks of pub receipts.

“Why are you saving all these pub receipts?” Chavez asked as he pulled the yellow notebook out of a pair of appallingly disintegrating underpants.

“For tax reasons,” said White Jim as he let the Jack Daniel’s burn its way down his throat.

Just like in a B-movie, thought Hjelm.

Chavez wrote down the names and addresses on the back of a pub receipt and handed the notebook back to White Jim, who tossed it into the room, belched, and then fell asleep sitting up.

Chavez and Holm laid him down on the floor, then pulled a blanket over the chalk-white body.

“That guy,” Chavez said as they came out into the sunshine, “is a truly great musician.”

Holm nodded.

Hjelm wasn’t sure what to believe.

Chavez returned reluctantly to police headquarters. Hjelm dropped Holm off at the nearest Stockholm address on White Jim’s list, then continued on to the address that was farther away.

Holm went to see the retired major Erik Rådholm on Linnégatan. He was a distinguished-looking gentleman in late middle age, with a passion for unusual jazz recordings that was as monumental as it was unexpected. As Holm later described him, he looked more like a Sousa admirer, a man for whom rhythm meant marching in step. But that was not the case. He had an enormous collection of illegal pirated recordings from the most obscure little clubs, from Karelia in Finland to the interior of Ghana.

At first he didn’t want to admit to anything that might be considered illegal. But by using methods that Holm refused to reveal, she got him to relent and, even with a certain pride, show her his impressive collection, hidden behind a bookcase that could be opened out into the room. He swore on “his country and his flag” that he would never dream of copying a single one of his unique recordings. Holm both saw and listened to Major Rådholm’s copy of Jim Barth Richards’s “Risky” tape. She stayed for two hours and also heard Lester Young in Salzburg and Kenny Clarke at the Hudiksvall Hotel.

Paul Hjelm drove to Märsta and visited the severely handicapped Roger Palmberg, who had been run over by the Stockholm-to-Luleå train; not entirely unintentionally, as Palmberg himself admitted, talking through his electronic speech apparatus. The only thing still intact was his hearing, but that was even better than before. They listened to White Jim’s “Risky” recording, and Roger Palmberg explained every little nuance, telling him exactly what was happening and precisely where it occurred and why.

Hjelm felt bewitched. He had serious doubts about the expression “Those who talk don’t know, those who know don’t talk.” Inside that devastated body was the most subtle listener he’d ever met, and not just a music listener but a listener in general. Simply by giving Hjelm his undivided attention, Palmberg managed to get him to reveal almost everything about the case. Palmberg thought that the cassette tape lead sounded incredibly interesting. He swore that he was innocent, and in return he received a promise that Hjelm would get back in touch once the case was solved. No one else had ever heard Palmberg’s copy of the recording, until now; he admitted point-blank that it was because no one ever came to visit him. He lived a solitary life, a situation that he had accepted. It was to music that he applied his innate capacity for listening.

So they listened to a couple of recordings of Jim Barth Richards from the late sixties, and Hjelm began to realize who it was he had visited in that repulsive one-room apartment in Gamla Stan. By the time he finally left Roger Palmberg in his relatively handicap-friendly Märsta apartment, he’d acquired a new friend in northern Stockholm.