The Man Who Smiled

by Henning Mankell

  It was 1 A.M. by the time he went to bed. It struck him that it was a long time since Linda had been in touch. On the other hand, he should have phoned her ages ago.

  Tuesday, November 23 was a fine, clear autumn day.

  He had taken the liberty of staying in that morning. He had phoned the station a little before 8:00 and told them he was going to Malmö. He had made coffee and stayed in bed for another hour. Then he had taken a quick shower and set off. The address Norin had given him was near the Triangle in the center of the city. He left his car in the multistory parking garage behind the Sheraton Hotel, and rang the doorbell at exactly 10:00. A woman of about his own age answered. She was wearing a brightly colored tracksuit, and he wondered if he was at the wrong address. She did not fit the image he had of her after hearing her voice on the telephone, nor did it correspond to the general and no doubt prejudiced idea he had of journalists.

  “So you’re the police officer,” she said cheerfully. “I’d expected a man in uniform.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Wallander said.

  She invited him in. It was an old apartment with high ceilings. She introduced him to her father, who was sitting in a chair with his leg in a cast. Wallander noticed the cordless telephone on his knee.

  “I recognize you,” the man said. “There was a lot about you in the newspapers a year or so ago. Or am I mixing you up with somebody else?”

  “No, that was probably me,” Wallander said.

  “And something to do with a burning car on Öland Bridge,” the man said. “I remember it because I used to be a sailor before the bridge was built, getting in the way of the ships.”

  “Newspapers exaggerate things,” Wallander said.

  “I remember you were described as an exceptionally successful police officer.”

  “That’s right,” the daughter said. “Now you mention it, I recognize Inspector Wallander from the photos in the papers. Weren’t you on some television talk show too?”

  “You must be mixing me up with somebody else.”

  “Let’s go and sit in the kitchen,” she said.

  The autumn sun was shining through the high window. A cat was curled up asleep among the plant pots. He accepted the offer of a cup of coffee, and sat down.

  “My questions are not going to be very precise,” Wallander said. “Your answers are likely to be far more interesting. Let me just say that the Ystad police are currently investigating a murder, possibly two murders, and there are certain indications to suggest that the transportation and illegal selling of body organs might be involved. I can’t say for certain if that is the case, and I’m afraid I can’t go into any more detail for technical reasons associated with the case.”

  Why can’t I express myself more simply? he wondered, crossly. I speak like a parody of a police officer. I sound like a machine.

  “I see why Lasse Strömberg gave you my name,” she said, and Wallander could tell that her interest had been aroused.

  “If I understand correctly you’re doing work on this horrific traffic,” he said. “It would be a big help to me if you could give me an overview.”

  “It would take all day to do that,” she said. “Possibly all night as well. Besides, you’d soon find there was an invisible question mark behind every word I said. It’s a gruesome activity that practically nobody has dared to look into, apart from a handful of American journalists. I’m probably the only journalist in Scandinavia who’s started digging into it.”

  “I take it that’s a pretty risky business.”

  “Maybe not here, and maybe not for me,” she said. “But I know personally one of the American journalists involved, Gary Becker from Minneapolis. He went to Brazil to look into rumors about a gang said to be operating in São Paulo. He wasn’t just threatened—one night when his taxi stopped outside his hotel someone fired a whole magazine at it. He booked the next flight and got the hell out of there.”

  “Have you come across any suggestion that Swedes could be involved in the trafficking?”

  “No. Should I have?”

  “I was only asking,” Wallander said.

  She studied him without speaking, then leaned across the table toward him. “If you and I are going to have a conversation, you have to be honest with me,” she said. “Don’t forget that I’m a journalist. You don’t have to pay for this visit because you’re a police officer, but the least I can ask is that you tell me the truth.”

  “You’re right,” Wallander said. “There is a slight possibility that there might be a connection. That’s the nearest I can get to telling you the truth.”

  “OK,” she said. “Now we understand each other. But I want just one more thing from you. If in fact there does turn out to be a connection, I want to be the first journalist who knows about it.”

  “I can’t promise you that,” Wallander said. “It’s against our regulations.”

  “No doubt it is. But killing people to take their body parts goes against something much more important than regulations.”

  Wallander considered what she had said. He was citing regulations that he had long since ceased to observe uncritically himself. In recent years his experiences as a police officer had taken place in a no-man’s-land where any good he might have been able to do had always involved his having to decide which regulations to abide by, and which not. Why should he change now?

  “You’ll be the first to know,” he said. “But you’d better not quote me. I’ll have to remain anonymous.”

  “That’s good,” she said again. “Now we understand each other even better.”

  When Wallander looked back over all the hours he spent in that hushed kitchen, with the cat asleep among the potted plants and the rays of the sun moving slowly over the plastic tablecloth before disappearing altogether, he was surprised at how quickly the time had passed. They had started talking at 10 A.M. and it was evening by the time they finished. They had taken a few breaks, she had prepared lunch for him, and her father had entertained Wallander with stories about his life as captain of various ships plying the Baltic coast, with occasional voyages to Poland and the Baltic States. Otherwise they had been alone in the kitchen, and she had talked about her research. Wallander envied her. They both worked on investigations, they both spent their time constantly running up against crime and human suffering. The difference was that she was trying to expose crime to prevent it happening, while Wallander was always occupied in clearing up crimes that had already been committed.

  What he remembered most from his time in that kitchen was a journey into an unimagined world where human beings and body parts had been reduced to market commodities, with no sign of any moral consideration. If she was correct in her assumptions, the trade in body parts was so vast that it was almost beyond comprehension. What shook him most, however, was her claim that she could understand the people who killed healthy human beings in order to sell parts of their bodies.

  “It’s a reflection of the world,” she said. “This is how things are, whether we like it or not. When a person is sufficiently poor, he’s ready to do anything at all to keep body and soul together, no matter how squalid his life might be. How can we presume to make moral judgments about what they do? When their circumstances are so far beyond our understanding? In the slums on the edge of cities like Rio or Lagos or Calcutta or Madras, you can hold up thirty dollars and announce that you want to meet somebody who’s prepared to kill another human being. Within a minute you have a line of willing assassins. And they don’t ask who they’re going to be required to kill, nor do they wonder why. And they’re prepared to do it for twenty dollars. Maybe even ten. I’m aware of a sort of abyss in the middle of what I’m working on. I get shocked, I feel desperate, but as long as the world continues as it is, I recognize that everything I do could be regarded as meaningless.”

  Wallander had sat in silence for most of the time. From time to time he asked a question to better understand what she was saying. But he could see that s
he really was trying to pass on everything she knew—or suspected, because there was so little anybody could be 100 percent certain about.

  And then, hours later, they had come to a stop.

  “I don’t know any more,” she said. “But if what I’ve said is of help to you, I’m glad of it.”

  “I don’t even know if I’m on the right track,” Wallander said. “But if I am, I know we’ve identified a Swedish link to this abominable trade. And if we can put a stop to it, that surely has to be a good thing.”

  “Of course it does,” she said. “One less plundered corpse in a South American ditch—that makes it all worthwhile.”

  It was almost 7 P.M. by the time Wallander left Malmö. He knew he should have phoned Ystad and told them what he was doing, but he had been too taken up by his conversation with Norin.

  She had accompanied him to the car park, where they had said their good-byes.

  “You’ve given me an awful lot to think about,” Wallander said. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Who knows,” she said, “perhaps I’ll get payment in kind one of these days.”

  “You’ll be hearing from me.”

  “I’m counting on that. You’ll normally find me in Gothenburg. Unless I’m traveling.”

  Wallander stopped at a bar and grill near Jägersro for something to eat. He was thinking all the time about what she had told him, and how he could fit Harderberg into that picture. But he couldn’t.

  He wondered if they would ever find an answer to the question of why the two lawyers had been killed. In all his years as a police officer, he had so far been spared the experience of being involved in an unsolved murder case. Was he now standing outside a door that would never open?

  He drove home to Ystad that evening feeling the weariness seep through his body. The only thing he had to look forward to was calling Linda when he got in.

  But the moment Wallander stepped into his apartment he knew that something was not as it had been when he left that morning. He paused in the hall, listening intently. Maybe it was his imagination. Yet the feeling would not go away. He switched on the light in the living room, sat down on a chair, and looked around him. Nothing was missing, nothing seemed to have been moved. He went into the bedroom. The unmade bed was exactly as he had left it. The half-empty coffee cup was still on his bedside table next to the alarm clock. He went into the kitchen.

  Only when he opened the refrigerator to get out the margarine and a piece of cheese was he sure that he was right. He looked hard at the open package of blood sausages. He had an almost photographic memory and he knew he had put it on the third of the four shelves. It was on the second shelf now.

  The package of blood sausages had been at the very edge and could easily have fallen out onto the floor—it had happened to him before. Then somebody had put it back on the wrong shelf.

  He had no doubt at all that he remembered it correctly. Somebody had been in his apartment during the day. And whoever had been there had opened his refrigerator, either to look for something or to hide something.

  His first reaction was to laugh. Then he closed the fridge door and walked quickly out of the apartment. He was scared. He had to force himself to think clearly. They’re not far away, he thought. I’ll let them think I’m still in the apartment.

  He went downstairs to the basement. There was a door at the back leading to the garbage. He unlocked and opened it. He looked out at the parking places lined up along the back of the building. There was no one around. He closed the door behind him and edged his way through the shadows along the wall. When he came to where it opened out onto Mariagatan, he kneeled down and peered at waist height from behind the drainpipe.

  The car was parked about ten meters behind his own. The engine was not running and the lights were off. He could make out a man behind the wheel, but could not be sure if there was anybody else in the car.

  He pulled back his head and stood up. From somewhere he could hear the sound of a TV set. He wondered feverishly what to do next. Then he made up his mind.

  He started running across the empty car park, turned left at the first corner and was gone.

  14

  He was gasping for breath before he had gotten as far as Blekegatan. Once more Wallander thought he was about to die. He had taken Oskarsgatan from Mariagatan, it was not very far, and he had not been running at full speed. Even so, the raw autumn air was tearing at his lungs and his pulse was racing. He forced himself to slow down, fearful that his heart would stop. The feeling of lacking the strength to do anything worried him more than the discovery that someone had been in his apartment and was now sitting in a car in the street, keeping watch over him. He struggled to suppress the thought, but what was upsetting him was really his fear, the fear he recognized so clearly from the previous year, and he did not want it back. It had taken him almost twelve months to shake it off, and he thought he had succeeded in burying it once and for all on the beaches at Skagen—but here it was, back to haunt him.

  He started running again. It wasn’t far to the block of apartments on Lilla Norregatan where Svedberg lived. He had the hospital on his right, then he turned downhill toward the town center. A torn poster outside the kiosk on Stora Norregatan caught his eye, then he turned right and almost immediately left and could see that the lights were on in the top-floor apartment where Svedberg lived.

  Wallander knew the lights were often on all night. Svedberg was afraid of the dark; indeed, that might have been why he chose to become a police officer, to try to cure his fear. But he still left the lights on in his apartment at night, so his career had not been any help.

  Everyone is frightened of something, Wallander thought, police officers or not. He stumbled through the front door and ran up the stairs, then paused when he reached the top floor to get his breath back. He rang Svedberg’s bell. The door was opened almost immediately. Svedberg had a pair of reading glasses pushed on top of his head and was holding a newspaper. Wallander knew he would be surprised to see him. During all the years they had known each other, Wallander had only been in Svedberg’s apartment two or three times, and then only after making an arrangement to meet there.

  “I need your help,” Wallander said when the astonished Svedberg had let him in and closed the door.

  “You look shattered,” Svedberg said. “What’s happened?”

  “I’ve been running. I want you to come with me. It won’t take long. Where’s your car?”

  “It’s right outside the front door.”

  “Drive me back to my place on Mariagatan,” Wallander said. “Let me get out shortly before we get there. You know the car I’m using at the moment, a police Volvo?”

  “The dark blue one or the red one?”

  “The dark blue one. Turn onto Mariagatan. There’s another car parked behind my Volvo, you can’t miss it. I want you to drive past and see whether there’s anybody in the car besides the driver. Then come back to where you’ve dropped me off. That’s all. Then you can go home to your paper.”

  “You don’t want to arrest somebody?”

  “That’s exactly the last thing I want to do. I just want to know how many people are in the car.”

  Svedberg had taken off his glasses and put down the newspaper.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I think somebody’s watching my apartment,” Wallander said. “I only want to know how many of them there are. That’s all. But I want whoever it is in the car to think I’m still in my apartment. I came out by the back door.”

  “I’m not sure I understand all this. Wouldn’t it be best to make an arrest? We can ask for help.”

  “You know what we’ve decided,” Wallander said. “If it has anything to do with Harderberg we should pretend we’re not very alert.”

  Svedberg shook his head. “I don’t like this,” he said.

  “All you need to do is to drive to Mariagatan and make an observation,” Wallander said. “Then I’ll go back to my apart
ment. I’ll phone you if I need help.”

  “I suppose you know best,” Svedberg said, sitting on a stool in order to tie his shoelaces.

  They went down to the street and got into Svedberg’s Audi, then drove past Stortorget, down Hamngatan, and left onto Österleden. When they got to Borgmästaregatan they turned left again. Wallander asked Svedberg to stop when they came to Tobaksgatan.

  “I’ll wait here,” he said. “The car’s ten meters behind.”

  Minutes later Svedberg was back. Wallander got into the car again.

  “There was only the driver.”

  “Thanks for your help. You can go home now. I’ll walk from here.”

  Svedberg gave him a worried look. “Why is it so important to know how many there are in the car?” he asked.

  Wallander had forgotten to prepare for that question. He was so focused on what he had decided to do that he had not taken Svedberg’s natural curiosity into account.

  “I’ve seen that car before,” he lied. “There were two men in it then. If there’s only the driver in it now, it could mean the other man isn’t far away.”

  This explanation was pretty feeble, but Svedberg raised no objections.

  “FHC 803,” he said. “But I expect you’ve written that down already.”

  “Yes,” Wallander said. “I’ll look it up in the register. You don’t need to worry about that. Just go home now. I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for your help.”

  He got out of the car and waited until Svedberg had disappeared down Österleden, then he started walking toward Mariagatan. Now that he was on his own again he could feel himself getting agitated, the nagging worry that his fear was making him weak.