The Sandman

131

Joona is staring straight at the medallion wallpaper, and repeating silently to himself that the Sandman is Jurek Walter’s twin brother.

That’s who’s holding Felicia captive.

That was who Lumi saw in the garden when she was going to wave at the cat.

And that was why Susanne Hjälm was able to see Jurek Walter in the darkness of the car park outside the hospital.

The warm projector is making small clicking sounds.

Taking his glass with him, Joona gets to his feet and goes over to open the curtains, then stands at the window gazing out at the ice-covered surface of the Klyazma River.

‘How were you able to find all this?’ he asks when he’s confident his voice won’t crack. ‘How many files and films did you have to go through? I mean, you must have material covering millions of people.’

‘Yes, but we only had one defector from Leninsk to Sweden,’ Karpin replies calmly.

‘Their father fled to Sweden?’

‘August 1957 was a difficult month in Leninsk,’ Nikita replies cryptically, lighting a cigarette.

‘What happened?’

‘We made two attempts to launch Semyorka. The first time the auxiliary rocket caught fire and the missile crashed four hundred kilometres away. The second time – the same fiasco. I was sent down there to remove the people responsible. Give them a taste of the little stick. Don’t forget that no less than five per cent of the entire GDP of the Soviet Union went to the installation at Leninsk. The third launch attempt succeeded and the engineers could breathe out, until the Nedelin disaster three years later.’

‘I’ve read about that,’ Joona says.

‘Mitrofan Nedelin rushed the development of an intercontinental rocket,’ Nikita says, looking at the glowing tip of his cigarette. ‘It exploded in the middle of the cosmodrome, and more than a hundred people were burned to death. Vadim Levanov and the twins were unaccounted for. For months we thought they’d been killed along with everyone else.’

‘But they hadn’t,’ Joona says.

‘No,’ Nikita says. ‘He fled because he was afraid of reprisals, and he would certainly have ended up in the gulag, probably the Siblag work camp... but instead he turned up in Sweden.’

Nikita Karpin falls silent and slowly stubs his cigarette out on a small porcelain saucer.

‘We kept Vadim Levanov and the twins under constant surveillance, and obviously we were prepared to liquidate him,’ Karpin goes on quietly. ‘But we didn’t need to... because Sweden treated him like garbage, and arranged a special gulag for him... The only work he could get was as a manual labourer in a gravel quarry.’

Nikita Karpin’s eyes flash cruelly.

‘If you’d shown any interest in what he knew, Sweden could have been first into space,’ he laughs.

‘Maybe,’ Joona replies calmly.

‘Yes.’

‘So Jurek and his brother arrived in Sweden at the age of ten or so?’

‘But they only stayed a couple of years,’ Nikita smiles.

‘Why?’

‘You don’t become a serial killer for no reason.’

‘Do you know what happened?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes.’

Nikita Karpin gazes out of the window and wets his lips. The low winter light is shining in through the uneven glass.