Ten Swedes Must Die

by Martin Österdahl

  Max nodded. It felt as if his brain were loose inside his skull and pounding against his hard cranium. There was a sudden sharp throbbing in his temples, and a new wave of dizziness washed over him.

  “A wall of NATO soldiers will be positioned along the Baltic region’s eastern border, between the Balts and the Russians,” Sarah went on. “That’s all that woman wants. If you read the Swedish Institute of International Affairs’s summary of the government’s new foreign policy, it’s clear that the Swedish government’s agenda is the same as Anastasia’s. And it’s definitely anti-Russian.”

  “The expansion of the EU is Sweden’s top priority in the area of national security,” said Max. “The Nordic region is being expanded to include the Baltic states. What the Swedish government isn’t saying but everybody knows is that the countries that apply for membership in the EU apply for membership in NATO at the same time.”

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  “If you only knew what a demanding boss I have.”

  Sarah smiled crookedly and sipped her coffee.

  “You have to go to the hospital, Max.”

  “The hell I do. I have to call DISS at the time we agreed on. Papanov showed me pictures of Goga Golubkin, the man the police are looking for, after he was blown to bits at Centrs.”

  Sarah raised her eyebrows so that they formed a wide arch. “Charlie specifically asked us to check out Centrs.”

  Max nodded.

  “Charlie boy has a lot of questions to answer.”

  75

  “A psychologist at a former Soviet prison contacted the police after he’d read that extreme nationalists were possibly suspected in the Centrs bombing,” said Ludmars Kaldenis of DISS in Riga. “When the police understood what the call was about, they contacted us.”

  Max was sitting with Sarah in her office. She listened in silence to the voice coming through the telephone’s speaker. Max had been promised five minutes.

  “And the symbols?” asked Max.

  “The psychologist had had a long relationship with one of the prison’s most dangerous inmates, a man whose body was covered with tattoos. Incomprehensible things. The man’s name is Zagars, Oto Zagars. Inside the prison walls, he became known as Kandinsky, a name inspired by the famous artist because he could paint with both pen and needle.”

  “Why did the psychologist contact you?”

  “The psychologist approved Kandinsky’s release but was afraid he’d been tricked.”

  “Tricked how?”

  “There is political pressure to demonstrate that the new Latvian system, in contrast to the old Soviet system, is capable of rehabilitating people who have been in prison for a long time. Kandinsky had caught on to that. During his last four years, his behavior was exemplary. He took care of the prison library and gave lectures to the other prisoners about Latvian history. Suddenly he even had visitors from outside, which he had otherwise never had during his entire long incarceration. We’re talking about a total of thirty-five years.”

  “Tell me about Kandinsky’s history,” said Max. “Why was he considered one of the most dangerous prisoners?”

  “This is a man who visited a family at their home in a suburb of Riga during his first evening of freedom after the first time he was released from prison twenty-five years ago. He started by cold-bloodedly cutting the throat of the woman, who had been in bed asleep. After her husband was woken up by the blood spraying over him, Kandinsky dragged him into a guest room in which his grown children, who were visiting, were sleeping with their own children. He tied the man to a chair and made him watch while he disemboweled them one after the other. When Kandinsky was finished with that, he beat the man to death with his bare fists.”

  Sarah was shaking her head in horror.

  “And you suspect him of having carried out the bombing at Centrs?” asked Max.

  “When everyone else was fleeing in panic, one man went against the stream. We do not know why. We requested a picture of Kandinsky from the prison and compared it to the image of the man from the security cameras. The height matches, but we haven’t been able to identify him because his face was covered. We would like to talk to him.”

  Max thought of the pictures Papanov had shown him. The one that Papanov claimed showed what was left of Goga Golubkin after the explosion. Did the man in the security-camera images walk into that burning hell in order to get to the Russian agent for some reason? If this man was Kandinsky, what was it he wanted?

  Max decided not to pursue this line of thinking right now and instead took the slip of paper he’d found in Maj-Lis’s house from the inner pocket of his jacket. Looked at the half-illegible address in Riga.

  “What was the name of the man whose family Kandinsky murdered twenty-five years ago?” he asked.

  “Raimonds Cilpa.”

  It was one of the names on the slip of paper.

  “Who was he?” asked Max.

  “He was the head of the Jesuit children’s home where Kandinsky grew up.”

  Max nodded. There wasn’t much left of the five minutes.

  “Could you send me the picture of Kandinsky?” he asked.

  “Certainly.”

  Max gave Kaldenis the fax number and ended the call. He leaned back in his chair, his temples throbbing. He needed much more coffee.

  “What was that last bit, about the head of a children’s home?” asked Sarah. “And what’s that slip of paper you’re holding?”

  Max held it up.

  “I found it in Maj-Lis’s house.”

  “But why did she have it?” asked Sarah.

  “I don’t know. Yet.”

  “An address in Riga?” She looked up from the slip of paper and looked Max in the eye. “You think he’s the killer? Kandinsky?”

  Max nodded. “There’s quite a bit that fits.”

  They turned toward the fax machine, which had started its high-pitched screaming and stubborn grinding. Max laid his fingers under the A4 sheet of paper.

  When he was holding the photograph of Kandinsky in his hand, he turned toward Sarah.

  “It fits the police description. Kandinsky is the man they’re looking for.”

  76

  Malin and Pashie were curled up on the big Laura Ashley sofa. Malin had called in sick to work. They had a blanket over their feet, and each of them was holding a large cup of chai with hot steamed milk. Pashie hadn’t said anything when she’d come in the door. Malin didn’t know about the history Pashie shared with Max, about what had happened a few years ago and was now coming back to haunt her. It wasn’t right to keep her in the dark, but it was also impossible to share everything with her.

  “Thanks for letting me be here. I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “It’s really no trouble. Has something happened with Max?”

  “Yes,” said Pashie. “But I’m not really sure what. Apparently we’re not safe at home.”

  “Good Lord! Why not?” said Malin.

  Max had been assaulted. Pashie had her suspicions about what individual or group was behind it. About why Max had ended up in a situation where he’d become a victim of violence. That damned police investigation. It was as if a curse hung over them. As if the past had a power they could never escape.

  Pashie shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I don’t want to go home right now. I don’t feel safe.”

  Malin took a sip of her tea without taking her eyes off Pashie.

  “Has anything else happened with the evaluation at Sophiahemmet Hospital?” she asked.

  “I’ve gotten the results of my tests. I’d say there was a mix of good and bad news. But right now the possibility of us having children seems more distant than it has in a long time.”

  Pashie had said it as if it were the most ridiculous idea in the world. With an unfortunate stress on the word us, meaning Pashie Kovalenko and Max Anger. The world’s most impossible couple.

  Malin laid a hand on Pashie’s.<
br />
  Pashie thought of the last time someone had taken her hand. That had been Denis, at Gondolen. She laid her other hand over Malin’s, squeezed it.

  “We’ve never talked about your meeting with the shaman,” said Malin, “but everyone who knows you has noticed that you’ve been behaving differently since then. What actually happened?”

  Pashie sighed heavily. She recalled that day last week when she met the man. He’d been briefly visiting Stockholm from Russia’s remote Altai region.

  From the start, the meeting had not at all been what she’d expected. The shaman had not been wearing animal skins; he had not been sitting in the wilderness somewhere. He had booked himself a double room at the Radisson Blu Royal Viking Hotel in Stockholm, and that had already felt wrong. The hotel was in the most hectic area of central Stockholm, near the Central Station. It had been a completely ordinary hotel room with gray wall-to-wall carpeting, a large newly made-up double bed, and a desk of blond wood in one corner.

  When Pashie had entered the room, she’d felt slight panic. She’d felt like she’d been tricked.

  The shaman had been dressed in a completely black tracksuit and had introduced himself as Robert. Even his name hadn’t fit with Pashie’s ideas about shamans.

  His face was narrow, long, partly covered with downy beard growth. His hair was coal black, shoulder length, stringy, and parted in the middle. His eyes were icy blue.

  Robert had asked her to lie down on the bed, but Pashie had preferred to sit on the edge of it instead. He had sat down next to her and stayed there in complete silence for what had felt like half an hour but surely hadn’t been more than half a minute. Pashie had felt uncomfortable because of his proximity; sitting so close together was something one only did with one’s lover or with a close friend, she’d thought.

  Finally he’d said, “How long have you been feeling the swelling?”

  How could he have known? She had not supplied any information at all in advance.

  “If it’s more comfortable, you can lie down. That reduces pressure on the abdomen.”

  “Thank you,” Pashie had said. “I would like to keep sitting here.”

  “Did you get your infections three or four years ago?”

  Pashie had nodded. She had looked at her hands, tried to get them to stop shaking. Interlaced her fingers.

  “They’re giving you a lot of hormones.”

  Pashie had nodded again. Robert had moved his hand along Pashie’s body. Though he had kept his hand some distance from her, she had thought she could feel his touch. The shaking in her hands had spread through her body. She had closed her eyes. Her body had arched in an attempt to stop the shaking, which had now become a jerking.

  The warmth had passed from her skull down through her jaws and chin, on through her throat and down into her chest. It had sunk deeper and deeper into her body until it had created a burning heat deep down in her belly. When the session ended, she found herself in a condition of complete relaxation.

  “You have strong spirits,” he’d said. “There is no hindrance to bearing a child in your body.”

  Pashie had looked at Robert’s expressionless face. She had felt lighter than she had just a short while earlier, but she had no idea how much time had actually passed. Her head had been crystal clear. She knew that what Robert said was true. She had always known it.

  “The problem isn’t with my body?” she’d asked.

  Robert had shaken his head.

  “Judge neither yourself nor him. The will of a soul is not easy to interpret.”

  Then he’d said something she would never forget. It gnawed at her at night and was the first thing she thought of every morning.

  Malin held her gaze.

  No, thought Pashie.

  “I haven’t even told Max.”

  Her friend nodded.

  The doorbell rang. Malin moved the blanket aside and stood up.

  “Who can that be?” she said. “Has Ola forgotten his keys?”

  Pashie heard her opening the door. She shivered, recalling Max’s words of warning, and wanted to stand up and stop Malin, but she got herself under control.

  “Hello,” she heard a man say. “I have an item here for a Pashie Kovalenko.”

  I’m not here.

  But then she realized it could be something from Max. She set her cup down, kicked aside the blanket, and walked toward the hall and the front door.

  Standing there was a bicycle messenger with the Ryska Posten logo on his chest. That was the messenger service they always used at Vektor. She walked up to the messenger, signed, and received a large cardboard envelope from him.

  “Thank you.” The young man hurried off down the steps.

  Pashie looked at the stiff cardboard envelope.

  “Work?” asked Malin.

  No sender was identified. Nothing at all was written on the envelope but her name.

  Pashie opened it and found a small stack of photographs.

  In the first one, Max could be seen leaning over the counter in a hotel reception area and speaking with a man. Behind him stood a young, pretty woman in tight jeans and a brown leather jacket. The camera had caught Max’s facial expression. He was wearing his best smartass smile. Giving the man a thumbs-up.

  The next photograph showed Max and the woman hurrying into an elevator while the man at the reception counter leaned forward and watched them. As though they had forgotten something but didn’t want to listen, as though it had been important to them to get to a private room as quickly as possible.

  The third photograph Pashie pulled out showed the two of them at a table in the hotel’s restaurant, sitting close together, engaged in a confidential conversation.

  Malin came up to her. “What is this?”

  Max never came home last night. Pashie let go of the photographs and the envelope, dropping everything. The photographs floated down to the hall floor, landing faceup.

  Malin put a hand to her mouth.

  The shaman’s words echoed in Pashie’s head.

  77

  Sarah came back to Max’s office with even more fresh-brewed coffee.

  “Has Charlie still not been in touch?” asked Max, accepting a cup from Sarah.

  “No. I’ve sent him a lot of text messages. Where the hell could he have gone?”

  Max took a sip and relaxed a little.

  His cell phone rang.

  “Hi, Sofia,” he said.

  “The murderer has struck again.”

  His headache was suddenly back, driving screws into his temples.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “On Ingarö.”

  “Ingarö?” Max repeated, looking at Sarah.

  Sarah put a hand to her mouth.

  The island of Ingarö lay on the other side of the narrow canal below Charlie’s house. It was only a few hundred meters as the crow flies.

  “What have you found?” he asked.

  “A house that burned to the ground. A dead man marked with the number seven. Sun symbols.”

  “Who is the man?”

  Sarah sank down onto the chair next to him with her head in her hands.

  “A married man with two sons. A very ordinary job as the head of a little company that sells heat pumps, a very ordinary Swedish life. Thus far I haven’t come up with anything that could constitute a motive.”

  Max looked at Sarah and shook his head.

  She exhaled and leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes.

  “Do you all still think a Russian agent is behind this?” asked Max.

  “I don’t care what the others think. You and I have to go back to the trail we were following before.”

  “What’s the man’s name?”

  “Steve Wass.”

  Wass, thought Max. He had run across that name not long ago, in the books he’d read.

  Beatrice Wass. The head nurse at the Örebro field hospital, from the book De vi vårdade. She had disseminated the pro-Soviet propaganda the Swedish gove
rnment had wanted to deliver to the Baltic refugees. She had developed and implemented strategies to sow dissension among the refugees, to get them to abandon their hunger strikes. She had administered the force-feeding of the inmates at night.

  That could not be a coincidence.

  “Can you check whether the family on Ingarö includes a Beatrice Wass?” asked Max.

  “Why should I do that? What are you thinking of?”

  “Do it first. Then I’ll tell you.”

  “Okay. Wait.”

  She typed something.

  “I’m coming over to see you,” she said.

  He heard a chair fall over as she stood up.

  “Beatrice Wass was Steve’s mother,” she went on in a low voice. “She died six years ago. How in the hell could you know that?”

  “I know it because this is all about punishment for old sins.”

  78

  “Good Lord,” said Sarah, when Max had put away his phone. “Another murder? I was so afraid it was Charlie.”

  Max thought of the secret room inside the closet and the documents from Norway on the desk.

  “Charlie asked me something a few days ago,” he said.

  “What was that?”

  “Whether he could have contact information for Hein Espen.”

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Max.

  “Do you think Charlie is with him?”

  “Hein Espen’s vessel, the Seaway Eagle, has been engaged in the recovery project in the Barents Sea. No doubt they’re on their way to the Kursk right now.”

  “But Charlie wouldn’t see a need to go up there with them, would he?”

  “Given what we saw at his place, it’s clear that Charlie doesn’t want to let go of this business with the Kursk, isn’t it? Sofia should be arriving here any time now. Could you ask Berga to establish the vessel’s current position? I’ll have to try to get hold of Hein Espen later, but there will be no point in trying to call his cell phone if he’s far out at sea.”

  Just after Sarah hurried into her office, Vektor’s doorbell rang.

  That was fast, thought Max. He went to open the door.

  But outside the door stood not Sofia but a man from the messenger company Ryska Posten with close-cropped dark hair and bicycle shorts.