Ten Swedes Must Die

by Martin Österdahl

  Sofia opened the gate and stepped out onto the roundabout.

  “It’s okay, Tom. Give us five minutes.”

  The policeman gave Max a last look before walking back to the guard hut.

  Sofia looked Max over. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here for a meeting.”

  “To discuss what?”

  “It has to do with a submersible, the URF.”

  Sofia Karlsson raised her eyebrows.

  “You never called me,” she said.

  “I was planning to call you after I saw you on the news.”

  “Who was supposed to be attending this meeting?”

  Max put his shaking left hand behind his back.

  “I’m not certain that information should be provided to the police.”

  “I am.”

  “I’ll have to ask you to address your question to the armed forces.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell them you were here. It was good to meet you in person at last.”

  Sofia turned around and started walking back toward the gate.

  “Is that Torbjörn Lindström’s chauffeur sitting in your car?”

  She stopped. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Where is Lindström?”

  “Why are you asking me about him?”

  “Because I was supposed to be meeting with him here.”

  Sofia Karlsson looked him over from head to toe.

  “I’m going to ask you to come to the police station. Leave all your contact information with your new buddy Tom.” Sofia pointed at the policeman standing by the guard hut looking at them. “I’ll be in touch later.”

  “I have something very important to talk to Lindström about. People’s lives are at stake. Is that his car parked in the lot over there?”

  “Max Anger.” Sofia looked at him thoughtfully. “This is a crime scene now.”

  20

  “This is the guy?” asked Sofia.

  On the other side of the glass, a large man with thin blond hair sat on a chair, sagging forward.

  “The Defence Ministry’s finest,” said her colleague. “We picked him up at home. It was almost impossible to wake him up. He took a shower here. Sweating like a pig.”

  “What have we done with him?”

  “We took DNA and fingerprints. We left the interview for you, as you wished.”

  Sarah nodded and walked to the door. The man at the table lifted his head to see who was coming. Straightened up.

  “Elias?” said Sofia.

  “Yes.”

  “This wasn’t the first time you were supposed to jump in as a substitute and guard one of our defense facilities, was it?”

  Elias shook his head, barely perceptibly. “When I did my military service, I was an Air Force Ranger. An elite unit.”

  Nothing was left of the old elite soldier. She’d seen it so many times before with military men, policemen, athletes. Men who let their ambitions turn into fear and their muscles into fat. Men—always men—who couldn’t handle the fact that life hadn’t turned out the way they’d wanted it to. Who couldn’t resist their inner darkness. Who turned to liquor or something even worse.

  She thought of Max Anger. After she’d closed her investigation of him, she had sometimes thought about him. Max wasn’t like the man on the other side of the table here. He possessed a comfortable, masculine assurance. A strength that wasn’t just muscles. Elias Skagerlind was a collapsed lump that stank of liquor despite the shower he’d had and all the coffee her colleagues had poured down his throat.

  “So what happened?” she asked. “Why weren’t you at your post?”

  Elias closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “We can get you help for your alcohol abuse, Elias. That’s the least serious aspect of all this—you understand that, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you want help with a lawyer?”

  “I have nothing to defend. I’m guilty,” he said with a sigh. “I know one should never let one’s ID out of sight. I had to piss, and I was completely wasted. Damn it, I’ve never had it affect me like that before, never had gaps in my memory, never slept for such a long time. When you all woke me up…I didn’t hear anything for a few seconds. I’m ready to accept my punishment. That others may live…”

  Elias opened his eyes.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It’s the motto of the PJs, our equivalent among the Yankees.”

  Sofia glanced at the two-way mirror set into the wall. She saw only the reflection of her own tired face. Damn, she thought. Does he not know why he’s been arrested? Where should she start? It might not be morally defensible or in accordance with the rule book, but she could always claim that she’d thought the other police officers had done their job and informed Elias properly.

  “Let’s take this slow and easy, Elias. First off, tell me more about what happened last night. You say you let your ID card out of your sight. Where was that?”

  “Cage Bar, Gamla Stan.”

  “Were you there all evening?”

  Elias nodded.

  “And how did you get home? Bus, subway, taxi?”

  There was a scraping noise as Elias rubbed his hand against his beard stubble.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “So you had to pee and you left your identification behind. Where were you sitting?”

  “At the bar.”

  “And where exactly did you leave your identification?”

  “In my sports coat, on the chair.”

  “You remember that? But you don’t remember anything that happened after that?”

  “I remember everything up to that point. Then it’s all damned blurry.”

  “Where is your sports coat now?”

  “Don’t know. At home, I think?”

  She looked up at the mirror again, knew the cops were standing on the other side, listening. She made a hand movement in the air: Go back and get the sports coat.

  “Were there a lot of people there?”

  “No, not at all. If there had been, I would have taken my ID to the restroom with me. No matter how drunk I was.”

  “So why didn’t you do that?”

  “Because I was alone.”

  “Completely alone?”

  “Yes, it was just the bartender, John, and me.”

  “Describe him.”

  “He’s good-looking, doesn’t talk much, doesn’t speak Swedish, speaks English poorly.”

  “Do you know where he’s from?”

  “From the south somewhere. Somewhere in Europe.”

  “You have to be more precise.”

  It was only then that Elias Skagerlind finally woke up for real. He swallowed.

  “What’s happened, exactly?”

  “I want you to describe John much more precisely,” said Sofia.

  “Maybe I should have a lawyer after all?”

  Sofia pounded the table with her fist, and Elias jerked.

  “You’re not going to waste more of our time now. Every minute we sit here, you are making things worse. Is he an Italian, a Spaniard, a Dutchman? I have to find him.”

  “I would think he’s a German or maybe a Czech or something like that.”

  Sofia sighed. “Describe his appearance.”

  “Fifties, tall, broad shouldered, fit. Short dark hair. Pretty high voice.”

  “That doesn’t give me anything I can use. Anything that sets him apart from others?”

  “One thing that’s strange is that he always wears something around his neck. Even if the weather’s hot.”

  “Have you seen him often?”

  “Yes. I’ve been there almost every evening this summer. And he was there working maybe five or six times.”

  “And he always had something around his neck. Why?”

  “I don’t know. But once when he bent over, I saw something on the back of his neck.”

  Sofia nodded. A tattoo, no doubt. A tribal pattern that was cool
on the continent ten years ago. Or the name of the girlfriend who realized one day that she could have something better. Drifter scum from Central Europe. That didn’t rule out all that many people, but it was better than nothing.

  “Light skinned or dark skinned?”

  “His skin is white. Chalk white. I joked with him about it one time. Asked if he was allergic to the sun.” Elias laughed, shook his head at his own joke.

  “How did he respond?”

  “He said he only lived at night.”

  Sarah nodded and wondered what that could mean. Was it just a smart comeback, or could it be true? Stockholm was full of people who lived their lives at night.

  “Do you drink a lot, Elias?”

  “Yes I do, unfortunately.”

  “You’re a pretty beefy guy. You can usually handle quite a bit of liquor, right? What was it that made you drink such a hell of a lot yesterday?”

  “That’s what I don’t understand. I don’t think I drank more than I usually do.”

  Sofia nodded. They would have to get a blood sample from him. He had clear memories from the period before he went to the restroom but not from the period after he came back. That he had slept for such a long time and also hadn’t heard anything for several seconds after he woke up suggested that he may have been drugged. But she didn’t want to give him that yet.

  “Has my ID turned up somewhere?” asked Elias. “Why are you asking me all this?”

  “You’re going to have to stay here for a while, Elias. I’d like you to think very hard about your relationship with this man and about everything you’ve said to each other.”

  “But…what is it I’ve done, exactly?”

  “You’re suspected of having been an accessory to murder.”

  21

  Denis Zynoviev stepped into the bomb shelter and heard the swish behind him as the heavy metal door closed. This was one of many shelters in Stockholm built to protect Swedes against people like Denis and his countrymen. Denis couldn’t help smiling at the thought. The Swedes had been persistent; no country in Europe had more shelters. They had more than sixty-five thousand; together, these could accommodate more than seven million people. On a visit to Stockholm, Winston Churchill had asked Swedish prime minister Tage Erlander what war the Swedes were planning to participate in with all these shelters they’d built.

  This one, just north of Stockholm, was on the premises of a shooting club the Russian embassy had reserved for its private use every Monday evening. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling spread a blinding white light over the bare furnishings. He picked up a pair of earmuffs at the entrance. It had become something of a tradition to get together after work on Mondays and let out a little aggression and have a beer. Someone always brought peanuts and a case of Baltika pilsner. This Monday, after the most hysterical day Denis had ever experienced at work, the need was greater than ever.

  A group of embassy employees was gathered around a lone man standing at one of the four shooting lanes. They were completely silent as he reloaded. Through his earmuffs, Denis could hear the hum from a ventilator shaft under the ceiling. The marksman had positioned his target at the maximum distance the lane afforded, twenty-five meters. There had been a great deal of talk about the weapon the man was holding, an innovation from the KBP Instrument Design Bureau in Tula. The GSh-18. Nine millimeter, eighteen rounds, semiautomatic.

  The man squeezed the trigger. Even standing four meters away, Denis could feel the force of the bullets drilling through the air. The man’s outstretched hand didn’t tremble in the slightest as he pumped out the shots. When he was finished, he took off his protective glasses and pressed a button to bring the target closer.

  Someone nodded at Denis, and the marksman turned to him. His look made Denis straighten up. Denis had heard about this man but hadn’t expected to run into him at an after-work party. In his youth, the man had belonged to the group that developed OMON, the Russian mobile police unit for special missions, in preparation for the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980. He had been a member of the elite group for a long time and was the first man in when the unit stormed the Latvian interior ministry in 1991. He had been Putin’s right-hand man in Saint Petersburg in the midnineties, and he had followed Putin to Moscow when Putin succeeded Yeltsin. Rumor had it that he had personally come up with the mobile unit’s motto: “We grant no mercy and ask none.”

  Now he was standing directly in front of Denis, studying him.

  “My name is Papanov,” he said. “You must be Denis Zynoviev?”

  An aspect of the legend of Papanov was that he never wanted people to use his title unless he was in uniform, which was very rare.

  “Yes,” said Denis. “Welcome to Stockholm.”

  “You and I have something to discuss,” Papanov said and walked past Denis toward the exit.

  Before Denis turned around to follow Papanov, he glanced at the target hanging in front of the cluster of embassy staff. There was just one hole in the target, in the middle of the human figure’s forehead. A hole made by the eighteen rounds from the magazine.

  22

  Two men were smoking outside the Cage Bar on Kornhamnstorg. They looked attentively at Sofia Karlsson as she approached the entrance, nodded at her, offered her smiles that contained everything she was not longing for. She met their looks with the attitude that had grown stronger ever since her meeting with Elias Skagerlind at the police station. Don’t get in my way, guys, regardless of whether you’re slightly drunk charmers or incompetent police colleagues. The smokers stepped to the side so she didn’t have to slow down when she yanked open the front door.

  The music inside was unnecessarily loud. There were only two guests in the place, long-haired guys in denim jackets sitting with their heads close together so they could hear each other over Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”

  The man on the other side of the bar didn’t look enthusiastic about her arrival. She probably wasn’t the kind of girl he’d hoped for. He asked her what she wanted to drink.

  “Is this your place?”

  “It’s my bar at the moment. The boss is sitting back there.” He nodded at a door.

  “It’s okay; I’ll find my way,” she said.

  The back room she entered was warm and stuffy. There was a little kitchenette in one corner with a mess of dirty coffee cups, ashtrays, and half-empty Marie cookie packages. At a little kitchen table sat a middle-aged man with piles of invoices and order forms in front of him. He looked up; behind his glasses, his eyes were surprised and bloodshot.

  “My name is Sofia Karlsson. I’m a police officer,” she said.

  The man laid his reading glasses on the table in front of him.

  “Thank God for that,” he said with a crooked smile. “I was afraid you were going to say you were from the bank.”

  Sofia pulled out a chair and sat in front of him. Sweat was trickling down her back toward her tailbone.

  “Is it tough?” she asked.

  He furrowed his brow. “Running a bar like this? Yes, it’s tough.”

  “You have to turn a blind eye to a lot of things, right? To get things done. To get all of those invoices paid on time.” She nodded at the stack of bills.

  “What did you find?” he asked. “A silverfish in a wineglass? A little marijuana in the men’s room?”

  The man leaned back in his chair. He was skinny, almost emaciated; he looked like one of those Stockholmers who’d hardly been outside the city since birth—about fifty years ago, in his case—and who lacked formal education but didn’t miss a game at Söderstadion. He spoke like a hard-core native of the island of Södermalm. A native who smoked three packs a day and lived somewhere on Hornsgatan.

  “I need to see a list of your employees. You do have all your papers and permits in order, right?”

  “It would go faster if you would tell me what you’re looking for.”

  “I’m looking for a man who calls himself John. He was working behind the bar here last night.�
��

  The owner nodded. As though he understood perfectly.

  “I’m looking for him, too. I’ve been trying to get in touch with him all day.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there wasn’t much money in the till when we opened this morning. I have a feeling he’s already left the country.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  The guy shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll be seeing him here again. Put it that way.”

  “How long was he working here?”

  “Two weeks. He substituted behind the bar five or six times. The personnel situation has been a nightmare all summer. Good weather, so everybody wants to leave town. People come up with all kinds of smart excuses.”

  “So then you take on people you don’t know, people you know nothing about? Where does he live?”

  “He said he was here temporarily, that he was traveling through. He was always wearing a backpack when he came in and left, as though he was carrying his possessions around with him.”

  What did that mean? That he had come from somewhere in Central Europe and was passing through? Stockholm was a terminal station for people like him—didn’t this guy know that? She would see to it that this John spent the rest of his life here if he proved to be guilty of what she’d seen out at Berga.

  “So where did he live? At your place?”

  The bar owner couldn’t hold back a nervous laugh.

  “He was staying at a youth hostel. One of those boats at Söder Mälarstrand.”

  Sofia made a mental note that she should check up on that.

  “Previous employer?”

  “He had good references. From Germany.”

  “Did you check them out?”

  He shook his head.

  “But you’re sure he’s German?”

  “The only thing I’m sure of is that he owes me money. And I always get my money back sooner or later.”

  “You’re a tough guy in a tough world, is that right?”

  The man said nothing.

  “Do you know Elias Skagerlind?” asked Sofia.

  “Who’s that?”

  Sofia took out a photograph taken at the station. Laid it on the table between them. The bar owner looked at the photo and nodded.

  “Yes, I recognize him. He’s a regular.”