Ten Swedes Must Die

by Martin Österdahl

  They had discussed their options. There was a lifesaving hatch at the stern end, and theoretically it would be possible to swim to the surface. But their chances of surviving the attempt were minimal. If they did not get help immediately, they would die of either decompression or hypothermia. In the absence of a life buoy, it would be a miracle if a rescue operation reached them in time.

  Lyomkin had decided to remain in the submarine. This was a major exercise involving the entire Northern Fleet. Rescue vessels and deep-sea divers were nearby. The likelihood that they would survive because a rescue vessel had docked near their disabled submarine was not great, but it was greater than the likelihood that they would survive an attempt to swim to the surface. There was nothing to do but sit and wait.

  Lyomkin was holding the rusty old hammer Sergey had kissed. At regular intervals he struck the hull with it to attract the attention of the other vessels. Sound carries well through water, and the Russian Navy had the world’s most advanced sonar equipment.

  Lyomkin was feeling increasingly unwell because of the poor air quality. He closed his eyes and remembered Sergey’s young wife standing on the quay in Vidyayevo. Their four-month-old daughter, whom Lyomkin had held in his arms, whose forehead he had kissed. He recalled the scent of the child’s hair.

  Lyomkin slid his hand inside his shirt, which was now wet. Closed it around the key hanging from his neck. Heard the spook’s monotonous voice once again.

  “We’ll have to talk again when your exercise is over.”

  SATURDAY,

  AUGUST 12, 2000

  1

  He ran to where she was hanging from the chains. It was so cold. She was so cold. She was dead; he was sure of it. He had arrived too late to save Pashie.

  The moment Max Anger opened his eyes, he was fully awake. His heart was racing as if he had been dropped behind enemy lines.

  But then he felt the warmth of the body next to him. It was only in the dream that he had failed. Pashie lay against him, wrapped—more than once—in a red-and-white checked blanket. The bare skin of her calves and part of her back were exposed.

  He caressed her leg. Her skin was warm. She was taking deep breaths, as if the warm, stuffy summer air were too thick for her.

  He thought of the struggle they had been engaged in for the past year. A struggle to move on in life, past that night in Saint Petersburg when Max had found her hanging from the chains. Start a family. A struggle it appeared they were losing.

  It had gotten to the point where Pashie had visited a shaman. She had met with him last night, had looked shaken when she got home. When he asked her what had happened, she had just shaken her head.

  Sometimes he didn’t understand her.

  She had said that a shaman was dependent on neither science nor politics. The old Russian traditions, she maintained, were not extremely different from the ones Max had grown up with on Arholma, in the farthest reaches of the Stockholm archipelago, where life was characterized by interactions with nature. Max wasn’t sure he agreed with her. But it didn’t matter.

  He glanced at the black face of his wristwatch. He pressed one of its buttons and a bright turquoise glow informed him that it was time to get up. The ache in his body reminded him of his round of sparring at the Narva Boxing Club yesterday afternoon. But that wasn’t what was bothering him.

  Pashie moved. She reached for the little lamp on the night table, rolled around, and turned to face him. She somehow managed to wrap the blanket around herself an extra time.

  “You look like a schoolboy on the last day of summer vacation,” she said with a smile.

  Max just smiled back at her.

  “Get up now, before Sarah starts honking down there. You can console yourself with the thought that I’ll still be here tomorrow morning.”

  That’s better than nothing, thought Max. On Sunday mornings they weren’t in a rush to get anything done—not work or anything else.

  “I’ll take that thought into the shower with me and hang on to it out there in the concrete jungle,” he said, getting up.

  She looked at him standing in his white boxer shorts. Looked him over from top to bottom.

  “Save me a little cold water.”

  Max nodded at her. All right, girl.

  “And don’t forget that we’re going to the Marklunds’ for dinner tonight.”

  “How could I forget that?”

  Pashie shook her head and rolled over again. When Max was on his way out of the bedroom, he heard Pashie switch off the lamp. Then she said, “Try to be friendly.”

  Suddenly his prospects for the next morning seemed more uncertain.

  Having a few secrets is one thing, he thought. Making and keeping a promise is something entirely different and more difficult.

  2

  When Max emerged onto Köpmangatan, a car was honking over on Skeppsbron, the street that ran along the quay of the same name. A BMW.

  Out on the water, a gigantic ship was approaching the Birka Cruises terminal. The Seas of the World made the Finland ferries at the dock look like little sailboats. Above the orange lifeboats that lined the ship’s railing were cabins with balconies. These were home to wealthy world citizens who woke up to a sea view every morning and enjoyed the status of tax-exempt sailors.

  Maybe we should be living like that, Pashie, thought Max. We could lie there on chaise longues, rest our eyes on the horizon, and let all of the people and injustices pass by before our feet.

  He crossed the broad street, which was quiet and empty, and opened the BMW’s passenger-side door.

  “Good morning,” he said. “You look shamelessly wide awake, boss.”

  “Don’t I?” said Sarah. “Hop in and buckle up.”

  Sarah Hansen was the head of Vektor, a Stockholm think tank concerned with democracy and security issues in the Baltic region. They had worked together for almost six years now, since the end of Max’s military career. They had gotten to know each other in the armed forces’ Russian-language program. Sarah had subsequently taken a lucrative detour through the finance sector and had made good money while he stayed and watched the Swedish military get disassembled, watched his colleagues take the armed forces’ property home with them.

  Sarah had once again bleached her hair platinum blond, a look favored by a lot of women from Eastern Europe, as Sarah was. She described her natural hair color as “ratty.” The contrast between her black eyebrows and white hair gave her a hard look, as though she had been created by an industrial designer. Her thin black eyeglass frames contributed to that look.

  Sarah made an illegal U-turn to drive toward Strömbron and on toward Östermalm and Valhallavägen, the street where Vektor’s headquarters were located. Nothing was moving this early Saturday morning except the seagulls over Saltsjön and empty McDonald’s french-fry boxes blowing in the wind from the Slussen transit hub. A tower with a clock at the top had been set up in Kungsträdgården. It was counting down to the inauguration of the Mir 2000 project, an event Pashie was working on at Vektor that focused on education, the environment, and culture in Sweden and Russia. It was supposed to give Swedish-Russian relations a kick start in the new millennium. The digits blinked and then froze again at the remaining time they indicated: eight days, three hours, and fifty minutes until the event.

  Today the Russian Navy was beginning its largest exercise in ten years in the Barents Sea. There had been no military exercise on such a large scale since the collapse of the Soviet Union. President Yeltsin’s sidling toward democracy had had a catastrophic effect on the Russian armed forces. Now the young new president, Vladimir Putin, wanted to restore the nation’s honor and get people to feel proud of their military again. For Max and Sarah, the exercise was a welcome interruption of a summer lull in activity at the office. The only event that had brought them in contact with each other during their recent vacation time was the bombing of the Galerija Centrs shopping mall in Riga a little over a week before. Their most exciting conversations at work t
hese days were about preparations for a surprise party for Chairman of the Board Charlie Knutsson, who would soon turn seventy.

  The clock on the BMW’s dashboard indicated that it was ten past eight.

  Sarah stopped at a red light and massaged her temples.

  “Rough Friday night?” asked Max.

  “I guess you could say that. Lisette called.”

  Max raised his eyebrows.

  Sarah hadn’t spoken with her ex-wife since she’d found a picture of Lisette with a man she didn’t know. After a stormy argument, Lisette had gone to Namibia with that man, a big-game hunter who liked hard women and rich Chinese people who wanted to shoot large animals. A good six years had passed since then.

  “What did she want?” asked Max.

  “To see the children. Can you believe that? Fucking bitch.”

  “Well, they’re her kids, too, right?”

  Sarah sighed. “Can we talk about this some other time? In another life?”

  “Okay?” said Max.

  Sarah looked at him with a tired expression. “Come on, give me a break.”

  “What is it you like to tell me? One has to forgive those who’ve harmed one so one can move on, oneself?”

  Max smiled at Sarah, who only shook her head. His smile faded when he thought about the previous night. He knew two people could live together and sometimes get into situations in which everything got locked up, in which the other person sometimes seemed like a complete stranger. Sometimes it was actually best just to leave things alone.

  Sarah deactivated the alarm as they entered Vektor’s headquarters. Somehow the place felt different on a Saturday. The air seemed to be standing still.

  Max walked over to the wall of TVs in the conference room. He switched on the international news channels, CNN and BBC World News, and Channel One Russia. The English-language channels were already covering the events in the Barents Sea. But they had no images of the exercise itself. The BBC showed a reporter standing in the wind next to a gray-brown cement quay somewhere. The footage could just as easily have been from Portsmouth as from Murmansk. CNN displayed its “breaking news” graphic while a panel sitting in Atlanta discussed the types of vessels currently at the Russian Navy’s disposal. The Russian channel was showing a pretty young woman in black tights and a blue bikini top pressing something called an Abflex into her abdomen to develop a six-pack. The item could be ordered over the telephone for cash on delivery.

  “Someone’s calling your direct number,” Sarah shouted from the hall.

  Max turned his back on the TVs and walked to his office. He picked up the handset.

  “Max?” It was a voice he knew well. “Have you heard the news yet in Stockholm?”

  It was Hein Espen Hovland.

  He’d had a diving accident many years ago, and Max had saved his life.

  Max smiled. The fact that Hein Espen was calling him now suggested that he had finally gone back to work after his long medical leave of absence.

  “What should we have heard?”

  “They called from Vardø. Strong seismic activity has been registered not only by them but as far away as Alaska.”

  “An earthquake?”

  “No, not an earthquake. We think the source is the exercise in the Barents Sea.”

  3

  Pashie crossed the open area between the kitchen and the living room on her way to the bathroom. She hadn’t been summoned with Max to the weekend meeting with Sarah, and she had no interest in it. After what had happened to her father and what she’d had to endure herself, Pashie despised the military and the police. Particularly those of Russia, her homeland. The only path to a better future for humankind was to give the men of the military and the police less attention, less money, and less power. To give more of all of those things to women. The half of humankind tasked with reproduction had an understanding of life the other half of humankind did not. Women couldn’t kill the way men could. That was one of the reasons women should run the world.

  This year her work at Vektor had had to do mostly with Mir 2000. Pashie was responsible for contact between the Russian embassy and Sweden’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs. She had also given a presentation about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child for children at the Russian-language school in Stockholm who were creating parts of an exhibition that would be held at the Stockholm tourist center the evening before the inauguration event in Kungsträdgården. One week left. She had already chosen the dress she would wear. People had said she was taking care of this project as if it were her own child.

  An unfortunate choice of words.

  She opened the bathroom door, let her black-and-red robe fall to the bathroom floor. Wearing only her panties, she looked at the reflection of her upper body in the big mirror. She had succeeded in what had been asked of her and was no longer so skinny. She felt that the padding she had put on emphasized her femininity, and she knew Max liked it.

  The words of the shaman rang in her head. “Judge neither yourself nor him. The will of a soul is not easy to interpret.”

  She opened the bathroom cupboard and looked at the arsenal of plastic bottles full of pills and cardboard boxes containing blister packs.

  Sweden’s ways of thinking were all based on science. That was the big difference between life in Stockholm and her childhood in a poor town on the Black Sea coast. Stockholm was a pulsating capital city growing year after year, driven by advanced technology, engineering miracles, and a near-superstitious belief in systems and statistics.

  Since she and Max had decided to seek help to have the child she longed for, she had been reduced to a number, a code in a computerized system. No one asked her how she was actually feeling. Nothing she said about her experiences affected the doctors’ decisions. She had listened to their analysis, memorized it as she did with everything. But she wasn’t comfortable with being reduced to an object of scientific study. It wasn’t something any woman would be comfortable with.

  She washed her hands carefully with hot water and soap. Then she got out what she needed and sat down on the toilet. The movement had been a little too sudden, and she felt the familiar nagging pain rise from her stomach. She straightened her back and took a few deep breaths while the pain lessened. Afterward she felt heavy; fluid imbalance was probably responsible for the pain.

  She unwrapped a little cloth on her lap, broke an ampoule, and pulled the liquid into the syringe. She poured powder into a spoon, sprayed the liquid into it so the powder dissolved, and pulled everything into the syringe. She switched to the finer needle, pressed out the air bubbles, pinched the skin just under her navel, and pushed the needle into the callus that had formed there.

  This was what her life looked like now. Injections every day, like a drug addict.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back. The cold porcelain of the toilet shocked her skin. She heard a muted noise from the floor, opened her eyes, and looked down at her robe. One pocket was flashing. Her cell phone. The silence and her fatigue washed over her. Intensified her feeling of disappointment in herself.

  She consoled herself by repeating in her mind the only thing on which the doctors and the shaman had agreed.

  No one is perfect.

  4

  Sofia Karlsson drove her Volvo along the curvy road Simpnäsvägen toward Skeppsmyra. There had been no discussion about whether she should take someone with her. No one had even bothered to bring up the subject. Maybe because they had known there would have been no point.

  Ever since Sofia had come to the National Bureau of Investigation from the Norrmalm police force, she had lived with the legend about her. The commonly held belief that she was a lone wolf. She did nothing to dispel it.

  To her, the coastal area of Roslagen was unknown territory. She had once been with a guy who had suggested a romantic weekend in Grisslehamn; that was the first and last time she’d been here. She’d stayed at the hotel in Grisslehamn for forty-five minutes, left the guy in the hotel’s sp
a without saying goodbye, and jumped on a bus back to Stockholm.

  Now, calmly driving with the music of Oscar Peterson in her ears, she felt she understood the charm of the place. She guessed Roslagen was okay as long as you were looking at it through the windshield of a car. She passed horse farms and bays. Towns that reminded her of Astrid Lindgren’s Noisy Village, with red walls, white corners, and green and brown doors. Her father had taught her that the green color was called hunter green and that the light brown of many barn doors was Roslagen mahogany, a mixture of tar, boiled linseed oil, and turpentine.

  In places, Simpnäsvägen was so narrow that there was barely room for her car. She wondered what she would do if any traffic came from the other direction, or how a perpetrator could flee at high speed on this road without drawing attention. How could anyone choose to live out here permanently?

  She had gotten this assignment early this morning. Her boss, Per Carpelan, had called her at home and given her a brief account of a brutal murder. State Secretary Tomas Schiller of the Ministry of Justice had himself called Carpelan about the case. Schiller had taken such a strong interest in the murder that Carpelan had called him his new temporary boss.

  The fact that Schiller—and thus the government—was bringing pressure to bear on the police meant that the case had been assigned the highest priority. It had to be closed before the media jumped on it. There were a number of markers on the body—that was the strange word Carpelan had used—that were “damned worrying,” but they were not going to dig too deeply into them because doing so would “provoke the development of a lot of damned theories.” They solved murder cases by looking at concrete evidence, and easily missed traces left at the scene of the crime often constituted such evidence.

  “Use your excellent knowledge of what thorough police work entails. Avoid engaging in speculation.”

  It had been the police in Norrtälje who had called the National Bureau of Investigation and asked for help. Unfortunately, because the murder victim had once been under temporary security protection, someone in Norrtälje had gotten the bright idea to call the Swedish Security Service, too, which had created the mess the bosses were now dealing with. Carpelan thought this was why the Ministry of Justice, as represented by Schiller, had gotten involved. If it hadn’t been for that misstep, they might have been able to work the case without a lot of unnecessary disruptions.