Europa Blues

by Arne Dahl

  ‘Missing?’ Hjelm exclaimed, perhaps a touch too gruffly.

  Sheinkman looked up. ‘I take it you didn’t know? Don’t the various police authorities talk?’

  Hjelm thought for a moment. ‘I’ll check why that information wasn’t passed on to me. I’m sorry. So your father had gone missing?’

  ‘Five days ago.’

  ‘Was that unusual?’

  ‘He had his own routine and he was a bit of a loner, really. Plus, he had his own annexe, so we didn’t necessarily see each other every day, but as far as I know he’s never been away overnight before. Not since Mum died. We reported it after the first night.’

  ‘Your father was nearly ninety. Was he in any way … confused? At that age, it’s not so unusual.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Sheinkman said, looking up. ‘He was a brain scientist; he deliberately kept his mind active so he could avoid all kinds of senility. The day he disappeared, he’d left the big Dagens Nyheter crossword behind. Solved down to the very last letter.’

  ‘Did you look for him?’

  ‘I tried. I went up to the Karolinska hospital – he used to work there; I went to KB, he often spent time there.’

  ‘The Kungliga bibliotek?’

  Harald Sheinkman smiled faintly.

  ‘Most people ask: KB? The pub? But no, he never went to the pub. The library, on the other hand … Yes. He spent whole days there, as far as I know. But when I started looking, it struck me how little I actually knew about his daily routine. I’d been working too much and neglected him, and then it was too late. That’s what I realised. I didn’t know where to look. No one I asked had seen him anyway.’

  ‘And there was no indication of anything having happened? Nothing unusual?’

  ‘No. And I can’t work out what he was doing in Södra Begravningsplatsen, either. He was an atheist and materialist, through and through – still respecting our Jewish traditions, of course – so I have absolutely no idea why he would go there.’

  ‘Can I ask how it came about that he was living with you?’

  ‘It was the other way round, actually. This is my childhood home. He bought the place in the fifties, straight from the architect. Anders Wilgotsson, if you’ve heard of him? I’m the eldest son, so Dad suggested I could take over the house and he could renovate the attic. It was a good arrangement. Family ties and complete independence at the same time. Maybe a bit too complete … I mean, he disappeared without me noticing. And then he went and got himself murdered. It’s unbelievable.’

  ‘What do you do, Mr Sheinkman?’

  ‘Can’t we stop with this “Mr Sheinkman” formality? It feels a bit forced. My name is Harald and yours is … Paul?’

  ‘Yes. Yeah, sure.’

  ‘I’m afraid I follow in my father’s footsteps. I’m a doctor. Though not in the … cerebral branch.’

  Hjelm managed to disguise a hoot of laughter as a cough, followed by a peaceful smile.

  ‘I take it you saw our esteemed boss on TV.’

  A similar smile appeared on Sheinkman’s face.

  ‘Not an especially dignified appearance, if I may say so,’ he said with a neutrality to rival Hultin’s.

  ‘No,’ Hjelm said. ‘Not especially.’

  ‘But they say you’re pretty good. The A-Unit – is that really its name?’

  ‘It’s a pet name. A nickname – whichever you like. Officially, we’re the Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Nature.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re well suited to something like this.’

  ‘We are, unfortunately. What your father was subjected to has to be called a violent crime of an international nature. Do you know the details?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harald Sheinkman said, looking down at the table. ‘It sounds like some kind of torture.’

  ‘Possibly. It’s not something you recognise? As a doctor? As the son of a … concentration camp prisoner?’

  Sheinkman peered up at Hjelm with a different look in his eyes. It was as though he had just decided to cut the crap, to stop the euphemisms. Perhaps something was telling him to trust this anaemic policeman with serious sweat patches and a red pimple on his cheek.

  He said: ‘I know very little about his time in the camp, actually; my dad was very reticent, as though he’d deliberately suppressed it. Plus, my competence as a medical expert is limited. I was a doctor in what we call the problem areas for practically my entire working life. I looked after people who had fled from torture and starvation and hardship. It was a round-the-clock job a lot of the time, often verging on unbearable. It was completely impossible not to take it home with me. Plus, I joined Médicins Sans Frontières and started travelling the world.

  ‘By the end, I was burnt out. Utterly passive for a few months; it’s only now that it’s starting to affect journalists that people have started taking notice. Health workers have been burnt out for decades. My wife left me and took our daughter with her, I couldn’t pay the mortgage on our flat in Södermalm and had to move in with Dad. Out here. That was twelve years ago. I just lay here on the sofa, completely out of it. I was thirty-nine and had suddenly lost everything.

  ‘That was when Dad had the idea of signing the house over to me and building a flat for himself in the attic. I suppose you could say it saved me. I started over. Built everything up from scratch. Got access to my daughter. Started working again, started writing too. I’m back up to my old workload again now, though it’s a bit different.

  ‘I started by writing reports on the current situation within the Swedish health care system and in the refugee-dense suburbs. It was hard to get anything published. I started writing … well, literature after that. I’ve had a couple of short stories published in cultural magazines and I’m working on a novel. You might say that I went in the complete opposite direction to my dad.’

  He fell silent. Paul Hjelm observed him. It had been a warning: that was how easy it was to get the wrong impression of a person. That was how easy it was to decide, in advance, what kind of person someone was. He had seen Harald Sheinkman as nothing more than the professor’s son, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and in some ways that was true. But in others? Not at all. It was a life lesson: never come to hasty conclusions about other people. It always ended badly.

  He would have liked to say something to Harald Sheinkman about his thoughts on the present day. That we really did need to keep a close eye on contemporary right-wing extremism – but that history probably wouldn’t repeat itself in such a straightforward manner. He was quite convinced about the return of fascism, but suspected it would probably take place in a much more subtle, indirect way – it would sneak in by a back route while we kept watch over its more obvious, simplistic manifestations – and then we would suddenly find ourselves standing face-to-face with a person but see them as an object instead, an item, a potential return. He was convinced that economism was the first step towards the new fascism.

  But he said nothing. Instead, he became a policeman once more.

  ‘In what way did you go in the complete opposite direction to your father?’

  ‘I’m the doctor who became an author. He was the author who became a doctor. Before the war, he was an author – I know that much about his past. He was from Berlin and he had a family, a wife and a young son who died in the camp; so in other words, I’ve got a long-dead half-brother.

  ‘His entire family was wiped out; he was the only one left. He couldn’t cope with that, so he started over. You could say he turned the page on that chapter of his life. He’d been an author before, a fairly dreamy and lyrical poet, judging from his diaries, but after the war he turned to the natural sciences and to medicine. I guess he needed something more concrete and permanent. His soul died in the camp, but the material survived. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’

  ‘He kept a diary in Buchenwald? Does it still exist?’

  Sheinkman nodded. ‘Up in his room.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Hjelm sai
d. ‘I have to ask, could I take a look at his apartment?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Harald Sheinkman, nodding and getting up. Hjelm followed him through the house and up a spiral staircase which seemed to have only quite recently been installed. They came to Leonard Sheinkman’s neat little annexe. It was bright and warm. Here, too, the walls were covered with books, primarily medical texts but also a number of literary classics. Just as Harald Sheinkman had said, the solved Dagens Nyheter crossword was lying on the kitchen table – nothing else. The place was clinically clean.

  ‘Did you tidy up?’ Paul Hjelm asked.

  ‘No,’ said Sheinkman. ‘He managed all that himself. He didn’t like disorder, that’s my main memory from childhood. Always clean and tidy. It was really hard work. For Mum too, if I recall. Though I don’t remember her so well. The memories are slowly fading. Soon there’ll be nothing left.’

  ‘Is it OK if I have a look around myself? We’ll send some forensic technicians over later.’

  ‘Of course,’ Harald Sheinkman replied, disappearing without a sound.

  Paul Hjelm watched him leave. Then, slightly awkwardly, he began wandering around the little flat; he counted two rooms and a kitchen. The light was pouring in through a line of sloping skylights and each of the walls was leaning inwards. It was some kind of slanted existence. And that slanted existence was, without a doubt, impeccably well kept. Not a speck of dust in sight.

  First a Jewish poet in cosmopolitan Berlin during the 1920s and 30s. Then a wife and family. And then the concentration camp where his son, wife, mother, father and all other relatives had died under awful circumstances. The man emerged an undernourished and tortured surviver. All illusions, all beliefs, all hope was gone. He moved to a new country, away from it all. He started over, from scratch. Learned the language, began a new family, got an education and a respectable job, became an esteemed researcher, bought a functionalist house straight from the architect, saved a son spiralling out of control and lived in the house together with him after his wife’s death.

  It sounded as though Leonard Sheinkman had managed the impossible – like such a remarkable number of others. He had managed to create a good, new life for himself. But how he had felt, deep down, that was impossible to know. His obsession with order and cleanliness was entirely natural after years in the concentration camp; you couldn’t draw any conclusions from that.

  Paul Hjelm needed to read his diary.

  It was essential.

  He eventually found it on a shelf, resting on top of a row of books; it was the only thing in the entire flat which seemed slightly askew. The yellowed, dog-eared, handwritten pages had been intensively read, turned and thumbed. The little book was no more than ten or so pages thick.

  And it was in German.

  An unforeseen obstacle. But compared with Leonard Sheinkman’s achievement, it was nothing. It was simply a matter of brushing up his long-forgotten high-school German.

  The pages were meticulously dated and numbered, and none seemed to be missing. It was just a matter of getting started.

  Just …

  He grabbed the little book and whirled down the spiral staircase. Harald Sheinkman was sitting on the sofa, looking exhausted. He stood up when Hjelm came spinning downstairs, walking over to him.

  ‘This must be the diary,’ Paul Hjelm said, fluttering the pages. ‘Is it OK if I take it with me? You’ll get it back.’

  ‘Sure,’ Harald Sheinkman said. ‘So you read Yiddish?’

  Hjelm blinked, staring in confusion down at the yellowed pages. The words changed shape before his eyes. Then he looked up at Sheinkman. A faint smile was playing on his lips.

  ‘I was just joking,’ said Harald Sheinkman. ‘It’s German.’

  Paul Hjelm looked at him and started chuckling. He liked this man.

  ‘One more question,’ he eventually said. ‘What kind of man was your father?’

  Sheinkman nodded, as though he had been expecting the question.

  ‘I’ve spent a while thinking about that. It’s hard to say, really. When we were kids, he demanded a lot of us. He was always fairly strict, a classic patriarch. We were to be doctors, all three of us, there was never any discussion. His campaign succeeded, to an extent. It went best with my little brother, David; he works as a brain surgeon and lecturer at the Karolinska hospital, he’ll probably be made professor soon. Later than Dad was, though. He’s forty-three now.

  ‘Channa, the middle child, she’s the one who rebelled. She was active in the left-wing movement in the seventies; she’s teaching in a school of social studies now. And then me, the eldest son, I obediently went down the medicine route but then refused to specialise in anything other than general medicine. He took it hard to begin with; he’d seen me as the chosen one. And when I started working in the poorer suburbs, in Tensta and Rinkeby, he just shook his head. But eventually, I think he found a certain respect for what I was doing.

  ‘He wasn’t an impossible person. When I came up against the wall, he was a real rock. When the whole world seemed to be falling apart, he was my anchor point. Our relationship was really good back then. He’d just retired and was full of life, and he’d finally managed to pull himself back together after Mum’s death. He was a man who’d had a completely different life once, and we never made it into that life – not even Mum.’

  Hjelm nodded and held out his hand.

  ‘Thanks very much, Harald,’ he said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  ‘I enjoyed our chat, Paul,’ Sheinkman said.

  ‘I did too.’

  On his way out, Hjelm said goodbye to the daughter. He found himself sitting, for a while, in his old Audi. He leafed through the yellow pages. Text which had been written inside a concentration camp, in the terrible Buchenwald. Leonard Sheinkman, the poet from Berlin, had somehow got hold of paper and a pencil and managed to keep it all hidden from the guards. It was a remarkable achievement.

  He turned the ignition, left Bofinksvägen and drove out onto Breviksvägen. The sky was still clear and blue, but it was as though the film had been pierced and wiped away – and the sky was actually blue behind it. The weight which had been pressing down on the landscape had been evened out. Nature was peaceful and beautifully springlike.

  Summer would come once more this year, in spite of everything.

  His mobile phone rang. Jorge Chavez said: ‘Yup.’

  He said no more, but Paul Hjelm immediately understood.

  ‘They found it?’ he asked.

  ‘The technicians managed to gather an unbelievable amount of stuff from the wolverine enclosure, I have to say. Everything from pieces of bread – as though the things were ducks – to rat traps. They found two rat traps in there. One of them was still set.’

  ‘It’s a new pastime. Tormenting animals. Horses are regularly abused in our open countryside.’

  ‘Plus eight beer cans. The long, sharp wire was inside one of the cans. A drug-addled wolverine must’ve gobbled down the skull, found the wire in its mouth like a fishbone and somehow spat it out into a beer can.’

  ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Paul Hjelm said, heading home.

  Home to the police station.

  15

  AT HALF EIGHT in the morning on Monday 8 May, a miracle occurred in the police station in Kungsholmen, Stockholm. For the first time in the history of the world, the sun was shining in the Tactical Command Centre.

  One by one, the members of the A-Unit entered the gloomy lecture theatre; one by one, they paused at the sight of the little patch of sunlight just inside the doorway. They crept reverently past it and headed for their seats, further inside the room. When the last of them arrived and closed the door, the little patch of sun disappeared. Viggo Norlander opened the door and just like that, it came darting back.

  The people gathered in the Tactical Command Centre were detectives, not mystics. A cause needed to be ascertained and a miracle shattered. Joint efforts deduced that the little pool of sunshine had
been made possible by five factors. First, the fact that the sun was actually shining outside. Second, that it was shining in through the window of the ladies’ toilet. Third, that the door of the ladies’ toilet was slightly ajar, having caught on a crumpled cigarette packet on the floor. Fourth, that the sunlight from the window in the ladies’ toilet was also falling on the glass of a third-rate painting which had been temporarily placed against the wall directly opposite the door to the Tactical Command Centre, waiting to be hung in Waldemar Mörner’s office whenever the aforementioned dignitary arrived. Fifth, that the sunlight hitting this painting of a bawling child was being reflected in through the open door of the Tactical Command Centre.

  The door was closed. The miracle shattered. Jan-Olov Hultin let his owl-like glasses slide down his enormous nose until they were practically level with his invariably well-shaven upper lip.

  ‘Good news,’ he said neutrally, ‘but we’ll save that for later. Firstly, I want to apologise to Sara for being dragged into yesterday’s TV debacle. A person should be thoroughly prepared before they take their place next to Waldemar Mörner.’

  ‘And a person shouldn’t move an entire bunch of microphones.’

  Who had said that? Who was this reckless person who had, so daringly, stuck their head into the lion’s mouth? They glanced around the room, waiting for the headbutt to come.

  This time, their combined efforts deduced that the words had, in fact, come from Jan-Olov Hultin himself. Self-criticism? A drastic change of personality was clearly under way.

  Was it a stroke? wondered four people whose names shall, for all eternity, remain anonymous.

  ‘It was a bit of a surprise,’ Sara Svenhagen said mildly.

  ‘Let’s move on,’ Hultin said as though nothing had happened. ‘The forensic technicians’ preliminary survey of Södra Begrav-ningsplatsen gave us nothing. Not a single usable footprint; not a single fingerprint on the rope or the body. They found Leonard Sheinkman’s fingerprints on a few pieces of the broken headstone below him, though. Should we just interpret that as a sign of pain? Or is it an indication that the gravestone had some kind of significance to him? Had he been on his way to that particular grave?’