Ten Swedes Must Die

by Martin Österdahl

  Just before he opened the door, Papanov said, “On the inside of the packet, you’ll find a telephone number at which you can always reach me.”

  72

  The morning commuters on the train from Märsta tried to avoid looking at Max. He had gotten on the train at the Solna station, which was just a short walk from the underground shelter in the Ballongberget area. Shortly after the train had started rolling, it had gone into a tunnel and Max had caught sight of his reflection in the black glass of the window. Dried blood in his hair had had a gel effect, making it stick out from his head in all directions. There was a large, dark bruise under his right eye. One cheek was swollen. His chin was scraped.

  His pain increased with the little jerks and bumps of the moving train. He didn’t dare think about what his body must look like under his clothes. Particularly, his ribs and one of his clavicles hurt. It was best not to sit down. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to get back up.

  The little packet lay in one of his jacket pockets. He took it out and read the text on it. Alprazolam. The taste of metal in his mouth was familiar. So was the calm feeling in his body. Two pills were missing from the blister pack. That was double the recommended daily dose. He had no desire to feel the full effects of traumatic shock and the damage to his body for the next day or so. He pushed out another blue convex pill and swallowed it. It displaced the gastric acid, and a new wave of numbing warmth spread through his body. He looked up and saw a man staring at him. The man turned toward the window and the sun, which was coming up over the Karlberg Palace park.

  Max walked through the Central Station like a sleepwalker, shut out all the looks and murmuring voices. People moved away when they saw him coming. He hadn’t brought any money with him from home the night before, but no one tried to stop him from jumping the entrance barrier and running down to the subway’s red line. When he got on the train, he leaned against the railing and had time to fall into a doze before the car braked and people tried to slip past him without getting too close.

  He got off at Karlaplan. He went out the first exit he came to and ended up on the wrong side of Valhallavägen. He walked to Banérgatan and saw a sign set up by Gustaf Adolf Church.

  “The Latvian embassy presents the world-famous Latvian National Choir. Morning concert, Friday, August 18.” He looked up, at the park that was named after the church. The doors of the church were open. He could hear the choir singing inside.

  His temples were throbbing; his ribs were on fire. Outside the church stood a stand holding program booklets. He took one, flipped to the first page, and saw the title of the first work to be sung by the choir. Felt his heart rate increasing.

  Max turned the booklet over. The organizers were identified on the back. The men’s last names ended in s, the women’s in a. He found the name he was looking for. Anastasia Friedenberga. The woman who appeared to have a special relationship with Charlie Knutsson.

  The vase of flowers in the window niche in the house on Värmdö.

  Tasenka.

  He had thought about the unusual name. He had heard about a person called Tasenka, but the mental leap had been too great. He had been unable to imagine that this could be the same person.

  The photograph missing from Maj-Lis’s house. The picture of Maj-Lis and a childhood friend sitting close together in a hammock.

  The childhood friend had been called Tasenka.

  Tasenka was the Russian short form for Anastasia.

  He remembered the monotonous tinkling of the music box at the Marklunds’. Pashie had asked whether he had heard the tune before. Said she thought it was the world’s most beautiful melody. He said he had in fact heard it before. At the home of Maj-Lis Toom. Her friend had taught it to her.

  “Aija zuzu.”

  Now it was to be performed here. But according to the program, all of the works to be performed here were Latvian.

  But that’s the wrong country. Maj-Lis fled from Estonia.

  Sofia Karlsson had said it early on. It had sounded like an innocent remark. Max had dismissed it is a simple mistake she had made because she didn’t know much about Sweden’s neighbors to the east. Now it instead seemed that her intuition had spoken, that what she had said was highly relevant.

  Something was off in the investigation of Maj-Lis Toom’s death. The wrong country came up all the time.

  Latvia.

  Maj-Lis and Anastasia.

  He turned around and transformed his slow steps into cautious jogging. Clenched his teeth. Every step felt like being stabbed with a knife.

  At the office the lights were off, the alarm on. Max deactivated the alarms and dragged himself into the office he shared with Pashie, tore off his dirty and bloody clothes, took out some fresh clothes he kept in the office, and went to the bathroom.

  In the brightly illuminated bathroom, he looked at his reflection in the mirror. His entire upper body was covered with black, blue, and purple spots; the shifting colors reminded him of Italian marble. He touched the swelling on his cheek with one hand, which sent a projectile of pain shooting along his neck.

  He stepped into the shower and let ice-cold water stream over him and wake him completely.

  Papanov had spoken to him as if he had been an old friend. He had given him medicine. The right kind. How could he know what kind of benzodiazepines Max usually took? Did he know about the genetic predisposition?

  Some of history’s most powerful men have the same predisposition.

  It was like a cat-and-mouse game. And Max wasn’t the cat.

  Back in the office, Max looked at the spines of binders in the bookcase. He stopped at a binder marked “1996,” opened it, and flipped to the end. There it was, the letter the mayor’s office in Saint Petersburg had sent to Vektor, informing them that they had been engaged in illegal intelligence-gathering activities and were henceforth forbidden to travel to the Russian Federation. The letter had been signed by the head of the committee for external relations at Saint Petersburg’s town hall: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Next to the name of the new president was another name, one to which they had not paid as much attention back then, but one that raised a number of questions now. The name of the head of the city’s mobile unit for special police missions.

  Mikhail Papanov.

  Saint Petersburg’s mobile unit had recently enhanced its notoriety by carrying out a so-called zachistka, a purification mission, in Aldi, a suburb of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. At least sixty civilians had been massacred and six women brutally raped. When the Russian authorities had proved unable to identify and punish those responsible, the event had attracted the attention of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which was considering trying the case in accordance with the European Convention on Human Rights.

  Max lifted the handset from the desk telephone and called home. Closed his eyes when he heard Pashie’s voice.

  “I’ve been assaulted,” he said. “And I think you could be in danger, too.”

  “What are you saying? Are you okay?”

  “Yes. But they know everything about us; where we live. They could be following you, too. Can you go somewhere? Where you’ll be safe?”

  “But I have to see you. I’ll come to the office.”

  “No, don’t come here. I won’t be here.”

  “Max, you sound—”

  “We can talk more later. Can you go somewhere?”

  “I can go to Malin and Ola’s place.”

  “Good. Do that. I’ll call you later.”

  When Max got back to Gustaf Adolf Church, a woman walked toward him. She looked concerned, but not as frightened as the people he had met on the way to the office.

  “The concert will be over soon,” she said.

  He extended a hand.

  “That’s okay. I just want to listen for a little while.”

  Max sat down in the last row of pews. The aisle was covered with a bright-red carpet. At the other end of the church stood the Latvian choir. Before the f
ront row of choristers stood water-filled glasses on wooden tables. From the singers came soft tones in a spectrum of sounds that, together with the glasses, created an aural pattern unlike anything Max had heard before in his life.

  He sat motionless, letting the music wash over him. In his banged-up head, he began laying down the puzzle pieces. Only now were they starting to come together.

  Maj-Lis Toom. The old Nazi bracelet. The Centrs. The symbols of the Baltic gods. The Russians who were looking for the man the Swedish police were looking for. A man who marked his victims with symbols of gods and numbers.

  The music ended, and Max stood up. He slipped out of the pew on the side closest to the wall and slowly approached the altar. Among the people who seemed to be concert organizers, he saw a familiar woman. She stood between two large men in dark suits with earphones in their ears. Swedish Security Service bodyguards. The woman was none other than Sweden’s minister of justice, a woman of Latvian descent. The bodyguards escorted her out of the church while Max approached the group she’d left behind at the altar. He had read something about her in a newspaper recently. Wasn’t she under consideration for a top job at the UN?

  The woman he was looking for was distributing flowers to the conductor and a few of the choristers. He could see that she’d been crying. The last members of the audience left their pews, and the church emptied out. The woman stayed; she was talking with a priest and some other people from the congregation. One of them flinched as Max approached, and they all turned around.

  “Tasenka?” said Max.

  She stood petrified and looked at Max.

  “Do you know him, Anastasia?” said the man who had seen Max coming.

  For a moment, Max saw in her face the young girl in the hammock from the picture at Maj-Lis’s house.

  “Don’t worry,” she said.

  “I need to speak with you. Alone.”

  Anastasia nodded and stepped to the side. She stopped in front of a door to the sacristy and turned around.

  “Who are you?”

  “Aija zuzu,’” said Max. “Is that a song that’s sung in Estonia?”

  Anastasia gave him a surprised look.

  “Why are you asking about that?” she asked.

  “Someone sang it to me when I was little. She said it came from her homeland, Estonia.”

  “It is a Latvian song. The Estonians have their own songs, which are sung in a language that does not have anything in common with ours. Do we know each other, Mr….”

  “Anger, Max Anger. I work for Vektor, an organization I believe you know well. The woman who sang the song told me that her best friend had taught it to her when she was a child. She was an Estonian Swede named Maj-Lis Toom. Did you know her?”

  Anastasia closed her eyes for a few seconds.

  Then she said, “She was, you say? What do you mean by that?”

  “She’s dead. She was murdered, and I need to understand why. Before more people meet the same fate.”

  Max caught the elderly woman just before her head would have struck the stone floor of the church. A man who worked in the church opened the sacristy door and helped Anastasia to a chair, brought her a glass of water.

  When she’d recovered, she asked the man to leave her and Max alone.

  Max sat down on a chair directly across from her and leaned forward.

  “Were you the friend who taught Maj-Lis the song?” he asked.

  Anastasia took a sip of water. “Yes. We grew up on the same little island. We were separated when my parents and I fled.”

  “But you grew up in Latvia? Do you mean that Maj-Lis Toom was not an Estonian Swede?”

  Anastasia nodded.

  “She didn’t have the advantages I had. Her mother was very sick. She had to get out of the country entirely on her own. What she had to go through…” Anastasia blinked away tears. “We never succeeded in healing our injured friendship.”

  “I want to talk with you more about her. But right now I need to know about something else. Where is Charlie?”

  Anastasia brought the glass to her mouth again, took a sip.

  “You were at his house last night,” Max said. “I saw the flowers you gave him and your name on the card. I heard about your meeting. How you challenged Charlie. It was obvious to those who were there that you and Charlie had a history.”

  Max watched Anastasia. She seemed to be in some kind of shock.

  “I need to find out where Charlie is,” he continued. “Do you know anything?”

  Anastasia shook her head.

  “I do not know where Charlie is. He is a man of great integrity. If he had wanted you to know, he would have told you.”

  73

  Pashie switched on the lamp on the night table. Max had sounded so tense—fired up and weak at the same time. Why should she hide? She had woken up in the middle of the night and seen that Max was not at her side, had lain awake and thought all kinds of things. But those thoughts seemed selfish now. Who had attacked him?

  She pulled on a burgundy robe while she fingered her cell phone, selected a stored number and called it.

  “Hi. I’m sorry to be calling you this early. I wonder if I could come over and stay at your place for a while.”

  There was silence at the other end.

  “This comes as a bit of a surprise,” a man finally said in slightly accented Swedish. “But you are certainly welcome.”

  Shocked, Pashie looked at the screen of her phone. She had accidentally called a number further down her call list.

  “I’m sorry, Denis,” she said in Russian. Her cheeks grew very warm. Shit! “I called the wrong number.”

  “It’s good manners never to admit having done that. You must not play with a man’s feelings that way, Pashie Kovalenko.”

  Pashie didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “You always know what to say, Denis. Sorry, I’m having a bad morning. I was trying to call my friend Malin Marklund but ended up calling the wrong number.”

  “For a minute, I thought you missed me.”

  “It was nice the other night. Thanks for the good food and wine.”

  “I think it’s going to be hard for me to go back to sleep now. You’re going to have to make it up to me somehow.”

  “I’m not coming over to your place.”

  “Let me treat you to dinner again. Since you’re not staying at home in any case.”

  Pashie wanted to end the call, get on with what Max had asked her to do. But she couldn’t just hang up on her contact at the Russian embassy.

  “Let me think about it. I’ll call you.”

  “My cell phone will be on.”

  She ended the call and hurried into the bathroom. She’d felt cold when she’d first woken up and was now freezing. She threw half the contents of the bathroom cabinet into her big toiletry bag and zipped it shut. Breathed out and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Imagined Denis for a moment, how he must have rolled over under his comforter with a big smile on his face, rested his head on his powerful bicep. Imagined the warmth under that comforter. Shook her head to drive away these thoughts. Picked up her cell phone again and dialed the number she meant to call to begin with.

  “Malin, it’s Pashie. Something’s happened. Can I come over?”

  “Yes, of course you can. Shall I come and pick you up?”

  “No, you don’t need to do that. I’ll jump in a taxi right away.”

  Denis Zynoviev put yesterday’s issue of Isvestiya down on the kitchen table. He had woken up early as usual, drunk coffee, and decided to bring himself abreast of the latest news from the homeland.

  He picked up his cell phone again. Spent a moment trying to think of clever words that would convince Pashie. It had been two months since Julia had left Stockholm for Moscow. For the summer had been their joint plan, but Denis had a feeling it would be longer than that. The desire he felt was not for her. He was quite sure Julia felt the same way. Their son, Eduard, was the only one they loved no
w.

  Denis touched the button that would reconnect him with Pashie if he pressed it a single time. He thought of their dinner at Gondolen. He had asked the taxi to drive along Skeppsbron so he could drop Pashie off at home. When he had gotten out with her to say goodbye, he had felt a strong impulse to kiss her.

  Instead of following his impulses, he reminded himself of the instructions he had been given. Papanov would know if he didn’t act in accordance with their agreement. And Denis didn’t want to think about what would happen in that case. He dialed a different number.

  “Directory information,” said a female voice.

  “Hello. I would like the telephone number and address for Malin Marklund, Stockholm, please,” he said.

  “One moment. There are eighteen people with that name in the Stockholm region.”

  Denis thought about what Pashie had said. She was going there now.

  “And how many in the city center?”

  “Let’s see. Six people.”

  “Okay. Could you read me those addresses, please?”

  74

  At Vektor, Sarah poured steaming coffee into a big cup and handed it to Max, who was straddling a chair turned backward in the little kitchen.

  “Who do you think attacked you?”

  “Probably the Russians themselves.”

  “The ones who came to rescue you afterward? Why the hell would they do that?”

  “That’s what they do when they want to recruit someone. Threats, pain, and then the rescue, all perfectly staged and packaged by some genius.”

  “Like Papanov? Putin’s pal?”

  Max nodded. He’d told Sarah about the letter he’d found in the binder earlier this morning. The one signed by both Papanov and Putin.

  “And Anastasia was a childhood friend of Maj-Lis? What does that mean?”

  “It means that Maj-Lis was a refugee from Latvia, not Estonia,” said Max. “Sofia was right. We’ve been talking about the wrong country.”

  “Anastasia is a pretty involved woman. She has her fingers in a lot of pies. Did I tell you she’s leading the lobbying to speed up the Baltic region’s entry into NATO?”