The Return of the Dancing Master

by Henning Mankell

  “I’m sorry I had to knock you out, but this meeting was necessary.”

  Lindman made no reply. Every word he said could be dangerous if the man really was mad. Silence was the only protection he had at the moment.

  “I know you’re a policeman,” the voice said. “Never mind how I know.”

  The man waited for Lindman to reply, but he didn’t.

  “I’m tired,” the voice said. “This has been far too long a journey. I want to go home, but I need the answers to some questions. And there’s somebody I want to talk to. Answer just one question: who am I?”

  Lindman tried to work out what it meant. Not the words, but what lay behind them. The man talking to him gave the impression of being perfectly calm, not in the least worried or impatient.

  “I’d like a reply,” the voice said. “You won’t come to any harm, but I can’t let you see my face. Who am I?”

  Lindman realised he would have to respond. It was a very clear question.

  “I saw you in the snow under my hotel window. You raised your arms and you’d left some prints in the snow like those in Herbert Molin’s house.”

  “I killed him. It was necessary. I’d spent all those years thinking that I would draw back when it came to it, but I didn’t. Perhaps I shall regret it when I’m on my deathbed. I don’t know.”

  Lindman was soaked in sweat. He wants to talk, he thought. What I need is time, time to work out where I am and what I can do. He also thought about what the voice had said: all those years. That was something he could latch onto, put a simple question of his own.

  “I realise it must have had something to do with the war,” he said. “Events that took place a long time ago.”

  “Herbert Molin killed my father.”

  The words were spoken calmly and slowly. Herbert Molin killed my father. Lindman had no doubt that Fernando Hereira, or whatever he was really called, was speaking the truth.

  “What happened?”

  “Millions of people died as a result of Hitler’s evil war, but every death is individual, every horror has its own face.”

  Silence. Lindman tried to pick out the most significant bits of what the man had said. All those years, that was the war; and now he knew that Fernando Hereira had avenged his father. He’d also mentioned a journey that had been far too long. And most important of all, perhaps: there’s somebody I want to talk to. Somebody besides me, Lindman thought. Who?

  “They hanged Josef Lehmann,” the voice said. “Round about the autumn of 1945. He deserved it. He had killed many people in the terror-stricken concentration camps he governed. But they should have hanged his brother as well. Waldemar Lehmann. He was worse. Two brothers, two monsters who served their master by making vast numbers of humans scream. One of them finished up with a rope round his neck, the other one disappeared, and if the gods have been incredibly careless he might be still alive. I’ve sometimes thought I’ve seen him in the street, but I don’t know what he looks like. There are no photographs of him. He had been more careful than his brother Josef. That saved him. Besides, what he enjoyed most was setting up others to carry out the torture. He trained people to become monsters. He educated the henchmen of death.”

  There was a sigh, or a sob. The man speaking to him moved again. A creaking noise, Lindman had heard it before. A chair, or maybe a sofa that creaked in that way. He’d never sat on it himself.

  He gave a start. He knew. He’d sat in exactly the same chair that he was now tied to.

  “I want to go home,” the voice said. “Back to what remains of my life. But first I must know who killed Abraham Andersson. I must know if I have to bear some of the responsibility for what happened. I can’t undo what’s already done, but I can spend the rest of my life lighting candles for the Holy Virgin and asking for forgiveness.”

  “You came along in a blue Golf,” Lindman said. “Somebody stepped into the road and shot at you. You escaped. I don’t know if you were wounded, but whoever shot you could well have been the person who killed Abraham Andersson.”

  “You know a lot,” the voice said. “But then, you’re a policeman. It’s your job to know, you have to do all you can to catch me, even if what has actually happened is the opposite and I’ve caught you. I’m not wounded. You were right: I was lucky. I got out of the car without being hit, and spent the rest of the night hiding in the forest, until I dared to move on.”

  “You must have had a car.”

  “I shall pay for the car that was shot up. Once I get home I shall send some money.”

  “I mean afterwards. You must have taken another car?”

  “I found it in a garage by a house at the edge of the forest. I don’t know if anybody’s noticed that it’s missing. The house looked to be deserted.”

  Lindman thought he could detect the beginnings of impatience in the man’s voice. He would have to be more careful about what he said. There was a clinking of a bottle, a top being unscrewed. Some swigs, but no glass, Lindman thought. He’s drinking straight out of the bottle. There was a faint smell of alcohol.

  Then the man described what had happened 54 years ago. A brief tale, clear, unambiguous, and totally horrific.

  “Waldemar Lehmann was a master. A genius at torturing people. One day Herbert Molin entered his life. I’m not sure about all the details. It wasn’t until I met Höllner that I realised who had killed my father. After that I was able to find out enough to know that it would be necessary and just to kill Herbert Molin.”

  The bottle clinked again. The smell of spirits, more swigs. This man is drinking himself silly, Lindman thought. Does that mean he will lose control of what he’s doing? He could feel his fear growing, and his temperature rising.

  “My father was a dancing master. A peaceful man who loved to teach people how to dance. Especially young, shy people. One day, the man who would hide behind the name of Herbert Molin came to him as a pupil. He’d been granted a week’s leave that he was spending in Berlin. I don’t know how many lessons he had, but I remember seeing that young soldier several times. I can see his face now, and I recognised him when I eventually caught up with him.”

  The man stood up. More creaking. Lindman recognised the sound, but it was from the house on Öland, Wetterstedt’s holiday home. I’m going mad, Lindman thought in desperation. I recognise a sound from Öland, but I’m in Härjedalen. The noise started again. From the right now. The man had moved to another chair. One that didn’t creak. Another memory was stirred in Lindman’s mind. He recalled the chair that didn’t creak. Where was this room?

  “I was twelve at the time. My father gave his lessons at home. When the war started in 1939 he’d had his dance studio taken away from him. One day a star of David had appeared on the door. He never referred to it. Nobody referred to it. We saw our friends disappear, but my father survived. Lurking somewhere in the background was my uncle. He used to give Hermann Goering massages. That was the invisible protection our family enjoyed. Nobody was allowed to touch us. Until August Mattson-Herzén turned up and became my father’s pupil.”

  The voice ground to a halt. Lindman was trying desperately to think where he could be. That was the first thing he needed to know if he were to find a way of escaping. This man he was sharing the room with could be unpredictable, he’d killed Mattson-Herzén, tortured him, he’d behaved exactly like the people on whom he had exacted his vengeance.

  The man was talking again. “I used to sit in on the lessons sometimes. Once, our eyes met. The young soldier smiled. I can still remember it. I liked him. A young man in a uniform who smiled. As he never spoke I thought he was German, of course. How could I have known he was from Sweden? I don’t know what happened next, but he became one of Waldemar Lehmann’s henchmen. Lehmann must have found out somehow or other that Mattson-Herzén was having dancing lessons from one of those disgusting Jews that were still in Berlin, and was being impertinent enough to behave like a normal, free, respectable citizen. I don’t know what he did to convince the y
oung soldier, but I do know that Waldemar Lehmann was one of the devil’s most assiduous servants. He succeeded in changing Mattson-Herzén into a monster. He came for his dancing lesson one afternoon. I used to sit out in the hall, listening to what went on in the big room after my father had pushed the furniture against the walls to make space for his lessons. The room had red curtains and a shiny parquet floor. I could hear my father’s friendly voice, counting the bars and saying things like ‘left foot’, ‘right foot’, and imagined his unfailingly straight back. Then the gramophone stopped. There wasn’t a sound. I thought at first they were having a rest. The door opened. The soldier hurried out of the flat. I noticed his feet, his dancing shoes, as he left. He generally came out, wiping the sweat from his brow, and gave me a smile, but nothing of that today. I went to the living room. My father was dead. Mattson-Herzén had strangled him with his own belt.”

  Lindman experienced the rest of what the man had to say as a long, drawn-out scream.

  “He’d strangled him with his own belt! Then shoved a shattered gramophone record into his mouth. The label was covered in blood, but I could see that it was a tango. I’ve spent the rest of my life looking for the man who did that to my father. It wasn’t until I happened to bump into Höllner that I discovered who the murderer really was. Learnt that my father’s murderer was a Swede, somebody who hadn’t even been forced into serving Hitler, never mind giving vent to an utterly pointless and incomprehensible hatred of Jews. He killed the man who had tried to help him overcome his shyness and teach him to dance. I don’t know what Waldemar Lehmann did to Mattson-Herzén, I’ve no idea what he thrashed into him, what he threatened him with. What made him swallow the ultimate Nazi lunacy. It doesn’t matter. He’d come to our house that day, not to learn how to dance, but to kill my father. That murder was so brutal, so horrific, that it is beyond description. My father lay dead with his own belt round his neck. He wasn’t the only one to die. His wife, my mother, and me and my brothers and sisters – all of us died. We all died with that belt round our necks. We kept our lives going, it’s true – my mother only for a few months, until she’d arranged for her children to go abroad. That was the last favour my uncle managed to extract from Goering. Once we were in Switzerland he committed suicide; now I’m the only one of us left. None of my brothers and sisters got beyond their thirties. One brother drank himself to death, a sister took her own life, and I ended up in South America. How I searched for that young man, for that young soldier who killed my father! I suppose that’s why I went to South America, where such a lot of Nazis had fled. I couldn’t understand how he had the right to go on living after my father had died. I found him in the end, an old man who’d hidden himself with a new name, away up here in the forest. I killed him. I gave him his final dancing lesson, and I was about to go home when somebody killed his neighbour. What makes me anxious is to what extent I am responsible for that.”

  Lindman waited for him to go on, but nothing was said for a while. He thought about the name Hereira had mentioned, Höllner. Something critical must have happened when they met.

  “Who was Höllner?”

  “The messenger I’d been waiting for all my life. A man who happened to be in the same restaurant as me one night in Buenos Aires. At first, when I discovered that he was a German emigrant, I was afraid he was one of the many Nazis who hid themselves in Argentina. Then I discovered that he was like me. A man who hated Hitler.”

  Hereira fell silent again. Lindman waited.

  “When I think back, it all seems so simple,” he said eventually. “Höllner came from Berlin, like me. And Höllner’s father had been given massage treatment by my uncle from the middle of the 1930s. My uncle was indispensable to Goering, who was constantly in pain as a result of his morphine addiction and couldn’t tolerate any masseur but my uncle. That was one starting point. The other was Waldemar Lehmann. A man who’d tortured and murdered prisoners in various concentration camps. His brother had been almost as bad. He was hanged in the autumn of 1945, but Waldemar they did not catch. He disappeared in the chaos at the end of the war and couldn’t be traced. He was high on the list of war criminals headed by Bormann. They found Eichmann, but not Waldemar Lehmann. One of those looking for him was an English major, called Stuckford. I don’t know why, but he was in Germany in 1945 and must have seen the horrors when they entered the concentration camps. He’d also been present when Josef Lehmann was hanged. Stuckford’s researches revealed that a Swedish soldier had been one of Waldemar Lehmann’s henchmen towards the end of the war, and that, egged on by Lehmann, the Swede had murdered his dancing master.”

  Hereira paused again. It was as if he needed to gather strength to tell his story to the end.

  “Some time long after the war Höllner and Stuckford met at a conference for people trying to trace war criminals. They talked of the missing Waldemar Lehmann. During the conversation Höllner heard about the murder of a dancing master in Berlin, and he also heard that the man responsible was a Swede called Mattson-Herzén. Another Nazi had passed the information to Stuckford while being interrogated, hoping for clemency in return. Höllner told me all this. He also said that Stuckford occasionally visited Buenos Aires.”

  Lindman heard Hereira reach for the bottle and put it down again without drinking.

  “The next time Stuckford was in Buenos Aires I met him, at his hotel. I introduced myself and explained that I was the son of the dancing master. About a year after that meeting I had a letter from England. In it Stuckford wrote that the soldier who’d killed my father, Mattson-Herzén, had changed his name to Molin after the war and was still alive. I’ll never forget that letter. Now I knew who had murdered my father. A man who used to give us a friendly smile when he arrived for his lessons. Stuckford’s contacts were eventually able to trace Mattson-Herzén to these forests.”

  He paused again. There is no more, Lindman thought. No more is needed. I’ve heard the story. Sitting in front of me is a man who has avenged the murder of his father. We were right in thinking that Molin’s murder had its origin in something that happened in a war that ended many years ago. It seemed to Lindman that Hereira had finished off for him a puzzle that he’d been working on. There was an irony in that Molin had also spent his old age solving puzzles, in the day-long company of his fear.

  “Have you understood what I’ve told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you any questions?”

  “Not about that, but I would like to know why you moved the dog.”

  Hereira didn’t understand the question. Lindman rephrased it. “You killed Molin’s dog. When Andersson was dead, you took his dog.”

  “I wanted to tell you that you were wrong about what happened. You thought I had killed the other man as well.”

  “Why should we know that we were wrong because of the dog?”

  His reply was simple and convincing. “I was drunk when I made up my mind what to do. I still don’t understand why nobody saw me. I moved the dog to create confusion. Confusion in the way you were thinking. I still don’t know if I was successful.”

  “We did start asking different questions.”

  “Then I achieved my aim.”

  “When you first came, did you live in a tent by the lake?”

  “Yes.”

  Lindman could hear that Hereira’s impatience had melted away. He was calm now. There were no more clinking noises from the bottle. Hereira stood up, the floor vibrated. He was behind Lindman’s chair now. The fear that had subsided now revived. Lindman remembered the fingers round his neck. This time he was tied up. If the man tried to strangle him, he wouldn’t be able to resist.

  When Hereira next spoke his voice came from the left. The chair creaked.

  “I thought it would die away,” the voice said. “All those terrible things that happened so many years ago. But the thoughts that were born in Hitler’s twisted mind are still alive. They have other names now, but they are the same thoughts, the same disgusting
conviction that a whole people can be killed off if another people or race ordains it. The new technology, computers, the international networks, they all help these groups to co-operate. Everything’s in computers nowadays.”

  Lindman remembered that he’d heard more or less the same phrase from Veronica Molin. Everything’s in computers nowadays.

  “They are still ruining lives,” the voice said. “They’ll go on cultivating their hatred. Hatred of people whose skin is a different colour, who have different customs, different gods.”

  Lindman realised that Hereira’s calm was skin-deep. He was close to breaking point, a collapse that could result in his resorting to violence again. He killed Molin, Lindman thought, and he tried to strangle me. He knocked me out, and now I’m sitting here tied to a chair. Unless I’m attacked from behind I’m stronger than he is. I’m 37 and he’s nearly 70. He can’t let me go because in that case I’d arrest him. He knows that he’s captured a police officer. That’s the worst thing you can do, whether you’re in Sweden or Argentina. Lindman had no doubt that the man in this room with him could kill him if he wanted to. He’d just finished telling his story of what happened, he’d made a confession, so what options were open to him? Running away, nothing else. And in that case, what would he do with the police officer he’d captured?

  I haven’t seen his face, Lindman thought. As long as I haven’t seen his face he can go away and leave me here. I must make sure he doesn’t take off this blindfold.

  “Who was the man in the road who tried to shoot me?”

  The man seemed impatient again.

  “A young neo-Nazi. His name’s Magnus Holmström.”

  “Is he Swedish?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought this was a decent country. Without Nazis. Apart from the old ones from Hitler’s generation who aren’t dead yet. Who are still hiding away in their bolt holes.”

  “There’s a new generation. Not many of them, but they do exist.”