The Man Who Smiled

by Henning Mankell

  Wallander waited expectantly.

  “You were also right in thinking it was a sort of cooler. But it’s not for medicine or blood. It’s for body organs intended for transplants. A kidney, for instance.”

  Wallander looked at him thoughtfully. “Are you sure?”

  “If I’m not sure, I’ll tell you,” Nyberg said.

  “I know,” Wallander said, brushing Nyberg’s annoyance aside.

  “This is a very advanced kind of plastic container. There aren’t a lot of them around, so it should be possible to track it down. If what I’ve managed to find out so far is correct, the sole importers into Sweden are a company based in Södertälje called Avanca. I’m about to investigate further.”

  “Good,” Wallander said. “One other thing—don’t forget to find out who owns the company.”

  “I take it you want to know whether Avanca is a part of Harderberg’s empire?”

  “That would be a start,” Wallander said.

  Nyberg paused in the doorway. “What do you know about organ transplants?”

  “Not a lot,” Wallander said. “I know they happen, that they’re getting more common, and that more organs are being transplanted. For myself, I hope I never have to have one. It must be very strange to have somebody else’s heart in your body.”

  “I spoke to a Dr. Strömberg in Lund,” Nyberg said. “He gave me some significant insights. He says there’s a side to transplants that’s murky, to say the least. It’s not just that poor people in the Third World sell their own organs out of desperation to survive—obviously that’s a business with lots of gray areas, from a moral point of view anyway. He also hinted at something much worse.”

  Wallander looked questioningly at Nyberg.

  “Go on,” he said, “I’ve got time.”

  “It was beyond me,” Nyberg said, “but Strömberg persuaded me that there’s no limit to what some people are prepared to do to earn money.”

  “Surely you know that already?” Wallander said.

  Nyberg sat down on Wallander’s visitor’s chair.

  “Like so much else, there’s no proof,” he said, “but Strömberg maintains that there are gangs in South America and Asia who take orders for particular organs, then go out and commit murder to get them.”

  Wallander said nothing.

  “He said this practice is more widespread than anybody suspects. There are even rumors that it goes on in Eastern Europe and in the U.S. A kidney doesn’t have a face, it doesn’t have an individual identity. Somebody kills a child in South America and extends the life of someone in the West whose parents can afford to pay and don’t want to wait in line. The murderers earn serious money.”

  “It can’t be easy to extract an organ,” Wallander said. “That means there must be doctors involved.”

  “Who’s to say that doctors are any different from the rest of us when it comes to morals?”

  “I find it difficult to believe,” Wallander said.

  “I expect everybody does,” Nyberg said. “That’s why the gangs can continue to operate in peace and quiet.”

  He took a notebook out of his pocket and thumbed through the pages.

  “The doctor gave me the name of a journalist who’s digging into this,” he said. “A woman. Her name’s Lisbeth Norin. She lives in Gothenburg and writes for several popular-science magazines.”

  Wallander made a note. “Let’s think an outrageous thought,” he said, looking Nyberg in the eye. “Let’s suppose that Alfred Harderberg goes around killing people and selling their kidneys or whatever on the black market that apparently exists. And let’s suppose that Gustaf Torstensson somehow or other discovered that. And took the cooler with him as proof. Let’s think that outrageous thought.”

  Nyberg stared at Wallander, eyebrows raised. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course not,” Wallander said. “I’m just posing an outrageous thought.”

  Nyberg stood up to leave. “I’ll see if I can trace that container,” he said. “I’ll make that the number-one priority.”

  When he had gone Wallander went to the window and thought over what Nyberg had said. He told himself that it really was an outrageous thought. Harderberg was a man who donated money for research. Especially for illnesses affecting children. Wallander also recalled that he had given money to support health care in several African and South American countries.

  The cooler in Torstensson’s car must have some other significance, he concluded. Or no significance at all.

  Even so, he could not resist calling directory assistance and getting Lisbeth Norin’s number. When he called her, he found himself talking to an answering machine. He left his name and number.

  Wallander spent the rest of the day waiting for things to happen. No matter what he did, what he was waiting for—reports from Höglund and Nyberg—was more important. He phoned his father and discovered that the studio had somehow survived the gales. Then he turned his wavering attention to everything he could find about Harderberg. He could not help but be fascinated by the brilliant career that had started inauspiciously in Vimmerby. Wallander appreciated that Harderberg’s commercial genius had manifested very early on. At nine he had sold Christmas cards. He had also used his savings to buy previous years’ leftovers. These he had snapped up for next to nothing. The boy had sold cards for a number of years, adjusting his prices to whatever the market would stand. Clearly, Harderberg had always been a trader. He bought and sold what other people made. He created nothing himself, but he bought cheap and sold less cheap. He discovered value where nobody else had found it. At fourteen he had recognized that there was a demand for antique cars. He got on his bike, bicycled around the Vimmerby area, poked his nose into sheds and backyards, and bought up any junked vehicle he thought he might be able to sell. Very often he got them for nothing, as people were too high-minded to think that they should exploit an inexperienced young boy who bicycled around the country districts and seemed to be interested in old wrecks. All the while he had saved the money he did not need to plow back into the business. To celebrate his seventeenth birthday, he had traveled to Stockholm. He had been accompanied by an older friend from a village near Vimmerby, an amazing ventriloquist. Harderberg paid all their expenses, and appointed himself the ventriloquist’s manager. It seemed that Harderberg had established himself early on as an efficient and unfailingly smiling aide who could further the careers of the up-and-coming. Wallander read several reports about Harderberg and the ventriloquist. They were often featured in Picture Parade, a magazine Wallander thought he could remember; and the articles kept referring to how well bred, how well dressed, and how capable of a friendly smile the young manager was. There were photographs of the ventriloquist, but not—even then—of his manager. It seemed he had shed his Småland dialect and adopted the way Stockholmers spoke. He paid for lessons from a speech therapist. After a while the ventriloquist was sent back to Vimmerby and anonymity, and Harderberg turned to new commercial projects. By the end of the 1960s his tax returns showed him to be a millionaire, but his big breakthrough came in the mid-1970s. He had spent time in Zimbabwe, or Southern Rhodesia as it was called then, and made some profitable investments in copper and gold mines together with a businessman called Tiny Rowland. Wallander assumed that this was when he had acquired the tea plantation.

  At the beginning of the 1980s Harderberg was married to a Brazilian woman, Carmen Dulce da Silva, but they divorced without having any children. All the time Harderberg had remained as invisible as possible. He never put in an appearance when the hospitals he had helped finance opened, nor did he ever send anybody to represent him. But he did write letters and telex messages in which he was modesty itself, expressing his thanks for all the kindness that had been extended to him. He was never present at the ceremony when he was awarded an honorary doctorate.

  His life is one long absence, Wallander thought. Until out of the blue he turned up in Skåne and installed himself behind the walls of Farnholm Castle
, nobody had any idea where he was. He was constantly moving from one house to another, being driven in curtained cars, and from the early 1980s on he owned a jet.

  But there were a few exceptions. One of them seemed to be more surprising and even stranger than the rest. According to something Mrs. Dunér had said in a conversation with Höglund, Harderberg and Gustaf Torstensson had met for the first time over lunch at the Continental Hotel in Ystad. Torstensson had described Harderberg afterward as likable, suntanned, and strikingly well dressed.

  Why had he chosen to meet Torstensson at a restaurant so openly? Wallander wondered. Well-known journalists specializing in international commerce have to wait for years before getting a glimpse of the man. Could that be significant? Does he sometimes change tack to create even more confusion? Uncertainty can be a hiding place, Wallander thought. The world is allowed to know he exists, but never where he is.

  Around midday Wallander went home for lunch. He was back by 1:30. He had just settled down to look through his files when Höglund knocked and came in.

  “Back so soon?” Wallander said in surprise. “I thought you were supposed to be in Ängelholm?”

  “It didn’t take long to talk to Borman’s family,” she said. “Unfortunately.”

  Wallander could hear she was unhappy with the trip, and her mood immediately rubbed off on him. It’s useless, he thought gloomily. Nothing here to help us break down the walls of Farnholm Castle.

  She had sat down on his visitor’s chair and was leafing through her notebook.

  “How’s the sick child?” Wallander said.

  “Children don’t stay sick for long nowadays,” she said. “I’ve found out quite a lot about Harderberg’s jet, by the way. I’m glad Svedberg phoned and gave me that to keep me occupied. Women always have a guilty conscience when they can’t work.”

  “The Bormans first,” Wallander said. “Let’s start with them.”

  “There really isn’t much to say,” she said. “There’s no doubt they think he committed suicide. I don’t think the widow has gotten over it, nor the son or daughter. I think it’s the first time I’ve realized what it must mean to a family when somebody takes his own life, and for no reason.”

  “He really hadn’t left anything? No letter?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “That doesn’t fit with the picture we have of Borman. He wouldn’t just drop his bike on the ground, and he wouldn’t have taken his life without leaving some kind of explanation, or an apology.”

  “I went over everything I thought was important. He wasn’t in debt, he didn’t gamble, and he hadn’t been involved in any kind of scam.”

  “You mean you asked about that?” Wallander said, astonished.

  “Indirect questions can produce direct answers,” she said.

  Wallander thought he understood what she meant. “People who know the police are coming make preparations,” he said. “Is that it?”

  “All three of them had decided to defend his reputation,” she said. “They listed all his good qualities without my needing to ask if he had any weaknesses.”

  “The only question is whether what they said is true.”

  “They weren’t lying. I don’t know what he might have done in private, but he does not seem to have been the kind of man who leads a double life.”

  “Go on,” Wallander said.

  “It came as a total shock to them,” she said. “And they haven’t come to terms with it yet. I think they spend every day and night worrying about why he would have taken his own life. Without being able to find an answer.”

  “Did you give any indication that it might not have been suicide?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Go on.”

  “The only thing of any interest to us is that Borman was in touch with Gustaf Torstensson. They were able to confirm that. They could also tell me why. Torstensson and Borman were members of a society for the study of icons. Gustaf Torstensson occasionally used to visit the Bormans. And Borman visited Torstensson in Ystad now and then.”

  “You mean they were friends?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think they were that close. And that’s what’s interesting, it seems to me.”

  “I don’t follow you,” Wallander said.

  “What I mean is this,” she said. “Torstensson and Borman were both loners. One was married, the other a widower, but they were loners even so. They didn’t meet very often, and when they did, it was to talk about icons. But don’t you think that these two solitary men, caught up in a difficult situation, might confide in each other? They didn’t have any real friends, but they did have each other.”

  “It’s conceivable,” Wallander said. “But it doesn’t explain Borman’s threatening letters to the whole law firm.”

  “The filing clerk, Lundin, wasn’t threatened,” she objected. “That might be more significant than we think.”

  Wallander leaned back in his chair and looked intently at her. “You think you’re onto something.”

  “It’s only speculation,” she said. “Probably far-fetched.”

  “We have nothing to lose by thinking,” Wallander said. “I’m all ears.”

  “Let’s suppose that Borman told Torstensson what had happened at the county council. Fraud. I mean, they can’t have talked about nothing but icons all the time. We know that Borman was disappointed and offended because there was no proper police investigation into what happened. Let’s suppose, too, that Torstensson knew there was a link between Harderberg and that swindling company STRUFAB. He might have mentioned that he worked for Harderberg. Let’s go a step further and suppose that Borman saw in Torstensson a lawyer with the same feelings about justice as he had himself, a sort of guardian angel. He asked for help. But Torstensson did nothing. You can interpret threatening letters in different ways.”

  “Can you?” Wallander said. “Threatening letters are threatening letters.”

  “Some are more serious than others,” she said. “Perhaps we should not have overlooked that Torstensson did not in fact take them seriously. He did not record them, he did not turn to the police or to the Bar Council. He just hid them away. The most dramatic discovery can sometimes be finding that an incident wasn’t really very dramatic. The fact that Lundin wasn’t mentioned might be because Borman did not know she existed.”

  “Good thinking,” Wallander said. “Your speculations are no worse than any others. On the contrary. But there’s just one thing you don’t explain. The most important detail of all. Borman’s murder. A carbon copy of Gustaf Torstensson’s death. Executions disguised as something else.”

  “I think you might have given the answer yourself,” she said. “Their deaths were similar.”

  Wallander thought for a moment. “You could be right,” he said. “If we suppose that Gustaf Torstensson was already suspect in Alfred Harderberg’s eyes. If he was being watched. Then what happened to Lars Borman could be a copy of what nearly happened to Mrs. Dunér.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” she said.

  Wallander stood up. “We can’t prove any of this,” he said.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “We don’t have much time,” Wallander said. “I suspect Per Åkeson will demand that we broaden the investigation if nothing happens. Let’s say we have a month in which to concentrate on our so-called prime suspect, Alfred Harderberg.”

  “That might be long enough,” she said.

  “I’m having a bad day today,” Wallander said. “I think the whole investigation’s going off the rails. That’s why it’s good to hear what you have to say. Detectives whose resolve starts to falter have no business being in the force.”

  They went to get some coffee, but paused in the corridor.

  “The private jet,” Wallander said. “What do we know about that?”

  “Not very much,” she said. “It’s a Grumman Gulfstream dating from 1974. Its Swedish base is at Sturup. It gets serviced in Germany, in B
remen. Harderberg employs two pilots. One’s from Austria and is called Karl Heider. He’s been with Harderberg for many years and lives in Svedala. The other pilot has only had the job for a couple of years. His name is Luiz Manshino, originally from Mauritius. He has an apartment in Malmö.”

  “Where did you get all that information from?”

  “I pretended to be from a newspaper running a feature on the private jets of Swedish business executives. I spoke to somebody in charge of PR at the airport. I don’t think Harderberg will be suspicious, even if he does hear about it. Obviously, though, I couldn’t start asking if there were logbooks that recorded his travels.”

  “The pilots interest me,” Wallander said. “People who travel that often with each other and spend so much time together must have a special relationship. They know a lot about each other. Don’t they have to have some kind of stewardess with them? For safety reasons?”

  “Apparently not,” she said.

  “We’ll have to try to make contact with the pilots,” Wallander said. “Hit on some way of finding out about the flight documentation.”

  “I’d be happy to continue with that,” she said. “I promise to be discreet.”

  “Go ahead,” Wallander said. “But get a move on. Time’s at a premium.”

  That same afternoon Wallander called a meeting of his investigative team, without Björk being there. They crammed into Wallander’s office because the conference room was occupied by a meeting of police chiefs from all over the district, chaired by Björk. After they had heard what Höglund had to report about her meeting with the Bormans, Wallander informed them about his meeting with Harderberg at Farnholm Castle. Everybody listened intently, trying to find a lead, something he might himself have overlooked.

  “My feeling that these murders and all the other incidents are linked to Harderberg is stronger now than it was before,” Wallander said in conclusion. “If you agree with me, we’ll go on following this line. But we can’t rely on my feelings, we must acknowledge that we haven’t solved anything yet. We could be wrong.”

  “What else do we have to go on?” Svedberg said.