by Arne Dahl
‘The other plausible option if you’re going direct from Sweden would be via Karlskrona. The M/S Stena Europe left Karlskrona at nine in the evening and arrived in Gdynia at seven on Friday morning. That would mean they had eight hours to drive those six hundred kilometres. Sounds much better. So I got in touch with Stena Line to check how many buses they had on board on that date. Turns out there were eight buses on that particular ferry from Karlskrona, leaving on the fourth of May. Four of the buses were organised trips and then there was one Polish, one German and two Swedish; one of the Swedish buses was full of single men on their way east to find partners or venereal diseases or something like that. One bus was on the way to scrap in a Polish scrapyard, and the others were private hires. But here’s the interesting part. What gets smuggled from Sweden to Poland rather than the other way round?’
‘IKEA furniture?’ suggested Viggo.
‘Moose antlers?’ suggested Jorge.
‘Almost,’ said Sara. ‘Sea eagles.’
‘Poached?’ asked Kerstin.
‘Get to the point,’ said Hultin.
‘The privately owned Polish buses were full to the brim with poached sea eagles. Swedish and Polish customs were evidently working alongside our environmental protection agency. It filmed the crackdown. There were a few minutes about it on Aktuellt on Friday evening. They’ve got quite a lot of extra film that they’re going to send over a bit later today. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to spot the other buses in the background. I was also planning on taking a trip down to Karlskrona to talk to the crew on the ship. The same crew is going to Gydnia again tonight. Will the budget cover a flight down to Karlskrona?’
‘Purpose?’ asked Hultin.
‘To show them pictures of Galina Stenina, Valentina Dontsjenko, Lina Kostenko, Stefka Dafovska, Mariya Bagrjana, Natalja Vaganova, Tatjana Skoblikova and Svetlana Petruseva. To see what the crew remembers. If the women were on board, they must’ve stuck out in one way or another.’
‘Have you learned their names by heart?’ Jorge asked in surprise.
‘It’s the least you can do, working on a case like this,’ Sara said cuttingly.
‘Trip approved,’ Hultin said curtly. ‘Viggo?’
As though it was the most natural thing in the world, Viggo Norlander said: ‘We’re having another baby.’
‘For God’s sake, Viggo!’ exclaimed Gunnar Nyberg. ‘Astrid’s forty-eight.’
‘Forty-seven,’ Norlander corrected him. ‘And how old’s Professor Ludmila?’
‘Congratulations, Viggo,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘Don’t listen to those fossils. They’re just jealous.’
‘Why the plural?’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘The women congratulate and the men commiserate,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Just as it should be. Congratulations, Viggo.’
‘Yeah, yeah, congratulations, you damn rabbit,’ said Hjelm.
A few more congratulations were uttered before Norlander, entirely unaffected, continued: ‘The circumstances of the other pimp’s death are, as you know, murky. The pistol which killed him was apparently made three minutes after Nikos Voultsos’s. The silencers were identical, too. I rest my case.’
‘Who was he?’ asked Kerstin Holm. ‘How did he get in touch with the girls in Slagsta? Was he the one who brought them here?’
‘His name was Finn Johansen, but he doesn’t seem the kind to have “brought” any whores here,’ said Viggo Norlander. ‘Though he did seem to have a certain talent for sniffing out new free agents. His speciality was finding girls who didn’t have any protection. So that’s probably what happened. I looked into the Norrboda Motell a little. Why was it that eight whores were given rooms right next to one another? Jörgen Nilsson clearly wasn’t the one who made that decision. He was brought in later, by none other than Finn Johansen.
‘I think it went like this: Botkyrka’s refugee centre was overflowing. When they were being moved, any single asylum seekers could put in a request if there was someone they wanted to share a room with. In the old centre, only a couple of our eight were living together. I think that they found one another somehow and decided to work together. It’s entirely possible that some of them weren’t working as whores before they came here. Though their pictures were really typical whore pictures. Johansen found out about the place and went down there to provide them with protection and drugs. I’d bet that was what happened. I’ve talked to a few whores who—’
‘Could you stop saying “whores”?’ asked Kerstin Holm.
‘Why? They are whores.’
‘There’s something so violent about that word. It’s like a rape, every time someone says it.’
Paul Hjelm glanced cautiously at her.
‘I’ll try,’ said Norlander. ‘But old dogs are old dogs.’
‘Very true,’ said Kerstin.
‘So, I’ve talked to a few girls,’ (without even a pause, Viggo thought happily, just as he continued), ‘who were part of Johansen’s group. He could be tough, apparently, but if you behaved then he was one of the better pimps on the street. That probably just means they had to go to A&E slightly less often than the others. Otherwise, there’s not much to say.’
‘Good,’ Hultin said honestly. ‘Paul?’
‘You’ve all heard about Voultsos’s stay at the Grand by now. Sixty-three thousand kronor, paid posthumously. Or rather, paid by his employer; according to Arto, the account belongs to the Ghiottone. I didn’t find anything of interest among the other phone numbers to and from Slagsta. The incoming calls were mostly from johns, the outgoing calls mostly from Finn Johansen, but under an alias of course. Girlfriend’s phone. Then there’s this thing with the Erinyes. “Ερινυ”. From a literary point of view, it’s pretty damn exciting. Have you heard of Aeschylus?’
‘I’m assuming you’ll be looking into the literary side of it in your own time?’ Jan-Olov Hultin said brutally.
‘Of course,’ Hjelm replied, continuing without further ado. ‘In ancient Greece, in the fourth century BC, people used to compete in the field of tragedies. The authors of these tragedies each wrote three dramas: they took themes from older myths, and the three tragedies belonged together, like a kind of suite. Only one complete suite, a trilogy, I suppose, survived. It was written by the eldest of the three great tragic authors, Aeschylus, and it’s called Oresteia. The first of its dramas is called Agamemnon and it’s all about a Greek commander from the Trojan War coming home. He brings a lover with him as a war trophy, an enchantress called Cassandra. His wife Clytemnestra has also found herself a new lover while he’s been away and she murders both her husband and his innocent lover. That’s the end. It sounds pretty banal, but I’ll be damned if it’s not one of the most venomous things ever to have been written. OK, part two of the suite is called The Libation Bearers. In this one, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s son Orestes is on the hunt for his mother and her lover. Honour demands that he avenges his father. A blood feud. Are you following?’
‘Mmm,’ said Hultin tentatively.
‘And just as he should, he takes his revenge and murders his mother. End of part two. The third part is called The Eumenides. Since he’s guilty of murder, Orestes is now being hunted by the most terrible beings that mythology has to offer. They come from the most ancient parts of the kingdom of the dead. They’re the goddesses of revenge, the Erinyes. “We are the children of eternal Night, And Furies in the underworld are called.”
‘They manage to catch up with Orestes, but just as the hour of vengeance is about to strike, Athena – the wise goddess of Athens – appears. In court, she replaces the ancient laws of bloodlust – the driving force behind the Erinyes – with a modern rule of law worthy of Athens’ new-won democracy. Barbarism is subdued, civilisation is triumphant. And the Erinyes are tamed; they become part of society by being offered “a calm and peaceful haven”. The era of primordial rage is over. The young, reasonable gods take over from the old, blind, hateful ones. And the Erinyes become
Eumenides. Powerless, but with a new-found peace. For the first time ever.’
Hjelm glanced around the Tactical Command Centre. It actually looked as though they were listening.
‘Is that how we want this to end?’ he asked.
There was a moment of silence. He looked at Kerstin; she looked back. With the same look he had given her. And it was very, very difficult to interpret.
Eventually, Hultin said: ‘Don’t you read anything else?’
‘Yeah,’ said Hjelm. ‘Leonard Sheinkman’s diary. But it’s too hard right now. I’d like to come back to it.’
‘Too hard?’
‘Too hard.’
‘Right then,’ said Hultin, slightly paralysed. ‘Well, Gunnar?’
‘One new thing,’ said Gunnar Nyberg. ‘The other skinheads confirmed Reine Sandberg’s version of events. They went out there to get drunk, break gravestones and sing Nazi battle songs in the Jewish cemetery. Then they caught sight of the old man. He didn’t have a little hat on, but they knew right away he was Jewish. They’d been planning on going over to harass him, maybe even beat him up a bit. And in that excited state of mind, they saw the black figures gliding over. That’s when they got scared like only those with exaggerated, false courage can be. They ran like mad.’
‘And the new thing?’ Hultin said neutrally.
‘He’d stopped at the gravestone. Leonard Sheinkman was standing by the gravestone with “Shtayf” on it.’
‘Yes!’ blurted Chavez. ‘I knew it.’
Nyberg continued, unperturbed: ‘When Sheinkman saw that the grave was broken, it looked like he started laughing. He bent down and touched the broken pieces. That was when the figures appeared. They peeled away from the trees like “strips of bark”, according to this Reine guy. The skinhead who stayed the longest says they were talking. Sheinkman exchanged a few words with the dark figures. Completely calm. Then it all happened really quickly, as though the whole process had been practised.’
‘It had been,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘It was the eighth time. At least. If I’ve managed to get on top of things, then it started in March last year. In Manchester. It was Antwerp in July, Budapest in October, Wiesbaden in December, Venice in February, Maribor in March – and Stockholm in May. You can see how the pace has been picking up. They’re getting better and better. It took them two months to plan the Stockholm attack. They had a lot to coordinate here, after all.
‘Stockholm was a renewal on many levels. A development. On the one hand, they were sending a sophisticated message to the Ghiottone organisation in Milan. On the other, they were going to murder another man, someone from a completely new category: an old professor. Both of these are a bit mysterious. Why send a greeting to Milan? Why murder a man who can’t plausibly have had the slightest thing to do with prostitution or pimps? Does the message to the syndicate in Milan mean something like we know who you are, you haven’t heard the last of us?’
‘Doesn’t sound so implausible,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘Maybe they’ve finally managed to find one of the big crime syndicates behind the growth in prostitution across Europe? And now they’re going after it, and they want them to know. They’re doing their bit for their fellow man.’
‘Isn’t it funny that we automatically say “man”? I do it too. But the fact is, if that’s true then they’re doing it for their fellow women. Our language always conditions us to put the emphasis on men. Just like society.’
‘And biology,’ said Jorge.
‘What are you saying?’ exclaimed Sara.
‘I read a comment piece in the newspaper this morning, by a scientist in forensic psychology. According to him, male violence is a purely biological phenomenon and has nothing to do with man’s role in society. There was even a diagram, with one line showing the concentration of testosterone in the blood and another the number of violent crimes which led to prosecution. The two lines followed each other point for point. Testosterone causes violence. Men who’ve been castrated have a decreased tendency for aggression. Evolution put this tendency for aggression in the male species so that they would compete with other men for the chance to reproduce and provide food. In all known cultures at all known times, men have been more prone to violence than women. All men are violent, but since we primarily focus on what’s in our own interests, we realise that using violence in the type of society we live in doesn’t have a positive effect. And so we divert our tendency to violence towards other, more productive activities, like sport.’
‘Just wait until you get home and we’ll see if that’s true,’ Sara Svenhagen said violently.
‘I’m just quoting the article,’ Jorge Chavez replied, castrated. ‘It’s interesting that this kind of thinking is actually in circulation among prominent scientists. He even had examples from the animal kingdom. I thought stuff like this had been disproved. Not least by huge female spiders killing their tiny males right after mating.’
Kerstin Holm said: ‘Biologism is all about the idea of people being completely controlled by the laws of biology. Economism means that all human activity can be linked to some kind of profit. Two words we should learn.’
‘This is all a bit close to measuring skulls for my liking,’ said Hjelm. ‘State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala.’
‘The Erinyes,’ said Holm. ‘It’s interesting that the ancient Greeks made their most violent beings women.’
‘Meaning our violently inclined Erinyes can’t be women,’ Hultin said neutrally. ‘Rethink.’
They looked at him. He didn’t bat an eyelid.
‘Should we try to move on now?’ he said eventually. ‘So that at least some work gets done?’
Kerstin tried to go back to her earlier train of thought. Finally, it led to something:
‘Maybe their Stockholm attack also involved a renewal of a third kind. We’ve got no proof that any prostitutes have been recruited before – but it seems like that’s what happened here, that the Slagsta girls are being transported to their base in Ukraine. It might be the first time it’s happened, and in that case, it’s a matter of starting to liberate prostitutes. Though it might well have happened earlier – the various European authorities’ knowledge of fallen women isn’t always exemplary.’
‘What kind of girls are these Erinyes, really?’ asked Viggo Norlander. ‘I mean, it doesn’t just seem to be the woman from Odenplan who’s highly trained; there seem to be at least five of them?’
‘I still get the impression she’s the leader,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘She’s the one who was in contact with Slagsta, the one they called from the bus in Lublin. But yes, they all seem well trained …’
‘So at least five in Södra Begravningsplatsen,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Plus at least one more on the bus, whoever it was who rang. The tour guide or something. Sounds like a pretty big organisation.’
‘And I think it’s getting bigger and bigger,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘But, Viggo, what kind of girls? It’s pretty serious violence. There must be hate and revenge involved. I think it’s a group of former prostitutes from Eastern Europe finally hitting back.’
‘With the maximum amount of pain possible,’ said Paul Hjelm.
‘Yeah. First they practically scare the life out of their victims with their ghostly creeping about. Then they use a near-scientific method to cause as much pain as they possibly can. It’s specialised, for sure.’
‘It’s certainly not normal,’ said Chavez.
‘No,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘It’s certainly not normal.’
24
PALACE. PALACE WAS the word.
You couldn’t call it anything else.
It was in the same area of the city as the cathedral, at the very centre of Milan’s concentric rings. Arto Söderstedt looked up at its sixteenth-century facade with the same fascination he always felt when faced with works of the Renaissance. That feeling of anything being possible, that man had just crawled up out of the dark ages; the feeling that the winds of change had been blowing in our dire
ction, that we would simply get better and better and never have anything to fear.
Things had been roughly the same with the IT revolution. Though now it was in a parallel world that anything was possible. This reality had been exhausted, but cyber-reality was entirely unexplored. An enormous map of nothing but blank space. Columbus, Vespucci, Cortés, Vasco da Gama, Fernão de Magalhães; each of them had been resurrected to colonise a new world for the wealthy holders of power. With any luck, genocide in cyberspace would prove to be slightly less bloody.
But its art would hardly reach such heights.
The palace was even featured in his guidebook. It had been built between 1538 and 1564 by an architect called Chincagliera, on behalf of the aristocratic Perduto family. The fact it was called Palazzo Riguardo seemed slightly ironic to Söderstedt. ‘Riguardo’ meant ‘respect’.
The garden, a glimpse of which could be seen through the wrought-iron gates, was magnificent if cramped, as all private inner-city gardens tend to be. Söderstedt closed the guidebook and put it back in his briefcase before pressing a button on the wall. There was nothing to be heard, nothing to be seen. The only exception was a lone cat stalking through the greenery, miaowing furiously.
He waited. The sun had been high in the sky all day. The first week of May was over, and summer had been inching its way up the Appenine peninsula, finally reaching Milan. He continued to wait, watching as the reddening sun peeped through between a couple of roughcast stone buildings which looked completely black against the bright disc in the sky. It was evening in the big city. The traffic was still intense, but the air felt cleaner. It was lucky that the drive from the hills of Chianti to the smog of Milan took so long; his lungs had plenty of time to get used to the pollution.
He waited. He wasn’t going to give up.
Eventually, an abrupt voice said: ‘Nome?’
‘Arto Söderstedt, Europol.’
His debut. It felt absolutely fine.
‘Carta d’identità?’
He held up his Swedish police ID and his provisional Europol card. He didn’t quite know where to hold them – he couldn’t see a camera anywhere.