Ten Swedes Must Die

by Martin Österdahl

  “Max Anger?” the messenger asked.

  Max took an envelope of stiff gray-beige cardboard from him.

  “Sign here.”

  Max went back to his office with the envelope. He sat down at his desk, took a penknife from the desk drawer, and opened it. Photographs.

  Max pulled out the first one. Pashie stood looking at Saltsjön, which was lit by evening sunlight. With a dreamy expression, she was looking at something on the other side of the water, in the direction of the Skansen open-air museum and the Gröna Lund amusement park. A man was taking her coat. Only his hands could be seen in the picture.

  In the next picture, she was sitting at a table with the same wonderful view of Stockholm. She had a glass of wine in her hand. She was smiling one of her warmest smiles at the man with whom she was exchanging toasts.

  In the next picture, the smile had become a laugh. She was blushing. The hand that wasn’t occupied with holding a wineglass lay on the table. In the man’s hands. The man wore a sharp-looking dark suit and a narrow, stylish tie. He was good-looking.

  The pounding in Max’s temples increased in intensity. The pain he’d been carrying around in his ribcage since the attack sank into his stomach.

  In the fourth picture, Pashie was embracing the man down on the street.

  In the last picture, Pashie and the man were jumping into a taxi together.

  So that was your evening on the town? thought Max. When you got home so late that I didn’t wake up. When your breath left the pillow smelling of alcohol.

  “You haven’t asked me where I was last night.”

  Pashie’s words rang in his head. He hadn’t given it a thought. He’d wanted to say something after she’d made that remark, but just then they’d arrived at Charlie’s house, where Sarah had been waiting for them.

  Who was he? Max knew there were things Pashie missed, things he could never give her. He hated to admit it to himself, but it hurt to see Pashie enjoying herself so much with another man.

  Max laid the pictures in a drawer in the cabinet under the desk. The strange feeling between him and Pashie had grown to a cancerous tumor.

  Who had taken the pictures? And why? Damn it.

  Max couldn’t think about that right now, not until they’d stopped the killer. And now it felt as though they were finally on his trail.

  He reached for the book that lay next to the computer monitor: De vi vårdade, the diary of the orderly, Anna Isaksson. At the back of the book was an index. Max went straight to the letter W. There he found her name.

  “Wass, Beatrice, p. 31-33, 55-57, 90, 111-115, 267-269.”

  The head nurse at the Örebro field hospital where the Balts had spent their last time in Sweden was described as cold, domineering, and sadistic.

  Max flipped back through the book to the chapters on the camp in Rinkaby where the Balts had been interned before they’d gone to the hospital in Örebro. There were photographs showing the barracks where the internees had slept stacked on top of each other in bunk beds accommodating four men each. They’d taken turns sleeping in the top beds, where there had been so little space that the men’s noses had bumped the sewage pipe that ran along the ceiling. Fencing and barbed wire had surrounded the yard outside. There had been guard towers in which black-clad men had stood with rifles in their hands, pointing the barrels at the people walking around down on the ground. Guards with German shepherds had patrolled along the fences. A passage surrounded by barbed-wire fencing led to the dining hall.

  One two-page spread in the book was covered with pictures of the bodies of young men. Their skin was milk white, as though the blood had been sucked out of them. Their ribs and clavicles stuck out as though they were trying to break free from the skin and break their bodies down into small parts, to become piles of bones, cartilage, and marrow. The only signs of life on the men’s faces were their beards. They had been denied the right to shave because of the suicide risk.

  How could this have happened? On Swedish soil?

  The internees had not been allowed to read or write letters without men and women working for the C-Bureau in Stockholm censoring them. The director of the camp in Rinkaby was a man who descended from a line of counts and had been pro-German but had changed his views after a visit to Berlin during the war. His second-in-command was named Leo Marcus. Testimony from the inmates painted a dark picture of him. During the war years and after the camp was established, Marcus interrupted his regular career as an architect to serve as the camp’s operational leader. He had not permitted any form of ideological or religious activity. Assemblies and open demonstrations of religious faith were forbidden. If the prisoners wanted to pray, regardless of whether it was to the Christian god or to any heathen gods, they had to do so alone, under their blankets. The internees had protested. It was generally known that Leo Marcus was a deeply religious man who regularly left Rinkaby to visit the synagogue in Kristianstad.

  Another sick irony among the many insanities of the war. A former Nazi descended from nobility had appointed a Jewish man to run a Swedish concentration camp.

  Max put the book down when Sofia came into the room.

  “Your boss let me in,” she said.

  She froze up when she saw Max’s face.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I was assaulted on my way home from the boxing club.”

  “Have you reported it to the police?”

  Max shook his head.

  “I woke up in an underground shelter in Solna. With the real Russian agents.”

  Sofia sat down in front of the desk and tossed onto it the symbology book Marju Bohl had recommended to them. The Emblem in Scandinavia and the Baltic.

  “Papanov?”

  “I think he wanted us to work together.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “Because he’s looking for the man we’re looking for. But it’s not Goga Golubkin.”

  “I don’t believe it’s Golubkin, either. But we have DNA connecting him to the crimes, so how can we establish with certainty that we’re right about that?”

  “The real Goga Golubkin is dead. Papanov showed me pictures of him after he was blown apart by the bomb at the Centrs shopping center in Riga. You were right. It’s the wrong country that’s coming up again and again. I met a woman who works at the Latvian embassy who knew Maj-Lis Toom. It’s pretty much certain that my old teacher was actually Latvian.”

  “And now Papanov wants to find the murderer to take revenge on behalf of a dead agent?”

  “I don’t really know what he wants. But that’s certainly one possibility.”

  Sofia leaned forward. “This business with Maj-Lis being from Latvia—does it actually change anything?”

  “It changes everything,” said Max. “To get on board the vessel going to Sweden, she must have presented false information to the representatives of the Odal defense organization. I called DISS as agreed. Do you remember that the slip of paper with the address on it that I found in Maj-Lis’s house was signed by a man named Cilpa?”

  Sofia nodded. “Who was he?”

  “He was the head of the children’s home where this man grew up.”

  Max handed Sofia the fax with Kandinsky’s image.

  “He’s identical to the man in the Identi-Kit picture,” said Sofia. “Kandinsky—is that what he’s called?”

  “He’s good at painting and at tattooing certain kinds of symbols. He’s the object of a manhunt in connection with the bombing in Riga and has previously been convicted of murder.”

  Sofia looked at Max. “I’m glad you kept following the trail we were going down before. But how could you know about our most recent victim’s mother, Beatrice Wass?”

  Max told her what he’d found in the book.

  “Didn’t Judaism come up early in the investigation?” he asked. “And didn’t that lead you to visit neo-Nazi organizations?”

  “Yes,” said Sofia.

  “Evidently the executive head of the camp
in Rinkaby was Jewish.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Leo Marcus.”

  Sofia shook her head.

  “Our first victim, the head of the Migration Agency, broke off contact with his parents and took a new last name. Claes Callmér was born at the hospital in Kristianstad. As Claes Marcus.”

  Max nodded. “The sins were committed not by the victims but by the preceding generation.”

  Sofia looked at De vi vårdade, which lay next to the symbology book on the desk. She bit her lip.

  “How many Balts actually died in Swedish camps?”

  “Seven chose to take their own lives on Swedish soil when it became clear that they were to be extradited. At least three of the passengers on the Beloostrov were executed after their arrival at the Soviet harbor. There could be an unknown additional number.”

  “Ten,” said Sofia. “Can that be a coincidence?”

  Max stretched. “It could be confirmation of what we’ve assumed. That the murderer is counting down from ten.”

  “Ten Swedes are killed. One for each Balt who died.”

  They both started when Sarah knocked on the open door.

  She stepped into the room. “The vessel left Aberdeen two days ago and is now in Trondheim.”

  “What vessel is that?” asked Sofia.

  Max explained that they were trying to get in touch with their board chairman, Charlie Knutsson, and that they suspected he was on his way to the Barents Sea.

  “When did you last hear from him?”

  “Two days ago,” said Max. “And it’s strange that he hasn’t gotten in touch. Today is his seventieth birthday, and we wanted to visit him and celebrate. Given everything that’s happened, it doesn’t feel good that we can’t get hold of him.”

  Sarah looked at De vi vårdade.

  “I just had a horrible thought,” she said.

  Sofia stopped her by holding up a hand. She looked from Max to Sarah.

  “It’s okay,” Max said. “Sarah was in the room when you called and told me about Wass. Her help has made it possible for us to move ahead more quickly in the investigation. Among other things, Sarah checked out the woman at the Latvian embassy I mentioned earlier, Anastasia Friedenberga, and that led us to the Baltic trail. You can trust her.”

  Sofia nodded and looked at Sarah, who swallowed audibly.

  “Was there anyone named Knutsson in the book you two were just discussing?” Sarah asked.

  Max started. Sarah’s thought was so obvious and painful at the same time. He went back to the index at the back of the book, found the letter K.

  “Knutsson, Gerhard, p. 164-166.”

  He was shaking when he flipped to page 164, dropped the book so it struck the edge of the desk. But he picked it up again and began to read.

  Sarah and Sofia stared at him.

  The heading made his heart beat faster.

  “Gerhard Knutsson, the slave driver.”

  Gerhard Knutsson was a Scanian farmer who had owned large fields on the plains around Kristianstad where the internees had been forced to work from early in the morning until late in the evening during the hottest weeks of the summer. They had been guarded the entire time by black-clad armed guards from Stockholm, the so-called men in black, who reported directly to the C-Bureau.

  Shit.

  “What was Charlie’s father’s first name?”

  “Jerker, Jeremy, Gert? Don’t tell me you’ve found something?”

  “There’s a section about a Gerhard Knutsson,” said Max.

  Sarah closed her eyes. “Damn it, that’s what I was afraid of.”

  “We have to get hold of Hein Espen now,” said Max.

  Max dialed Hein Espen’s number and put the phone on speaker. Sarah and Sofia came and stood next to him where he stood leaning over the desk. If the information from Berga was correct, they should reach him on his cell phone in Trondheim without any problems.

  “Thanks for your text message,” Hein Espen said when he answered. “I’m sorry I haven’t had time to call you.”

  “No problem,” said Max. “I’m sitting here with the head of Vektor, Sarah Hansen, and Sofia Karlsson of the National Bureau of Investigation in Stockholm. We need to ask you a few questions.”

  Hein Espen was silent for a few seconds.

  “You know I’ll help you in any way I can,” he said afterward. “What can I do for you?”

  “I gave your contact information to our board chairman, Charlie Knutsson. We’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with him for almost two days now. We’re afraid something could have happened to him.”

  “I thought you might be calling about that,” said Hein Espen. “I can reassure you by saying that yes, he called me, and yes, he’s aboard my ship. I had a meeting with him at his hotel in Trondheim before we set sail. A very pleasant man. Philosophical. He said he was just looking for a special experience on his seventieth birthday.”

  Max exhaled heavily. Finally they knew where Charlie was and that he was in safe hands, at least for the time being. And for the time being, Max would let slide the fact that he didn’t really buy the explanation that Charlie was philosophical and just wanted to have a special experience on his seventieth birthday.

  “So you take tourists aboard?”

  Hein Espen started laughing.

  “Yes, in fact. We’ve splurged and given the vessel a major facelift. Now she even has a relaxation area.”

  “I hope it’s worth it.”

  “You have no idea. It’s like Noah’s ark.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone wants to go along on the trip.”

  Max swallowed. “You mentioned having cast off. When did you leave Trondheim?”

  “Twenty minutes ago.”

  “What nationalities are represented among the passengers on Noah’s ark?”

  “Many. Are you interested in one in particular?”

  “Balts?” asked Max. “Russians?”

  “No Balts. But we have a Russian.”

  Max described the Identi-Kit picture of Kandinsky the police had sent out.

  “No, that’s not our Russian. This guy was blond and wearing a uniform.”

  “Do you have the name? It’s important that I find out what it is.”

  “Of course. Just a moment.”

  It got so quiet that Max worried that the Seaway Eagle might have gotten so far from the Norwegian coast that there was no longer cell coverage.

  Finally Hein Espen came back.

  “Here it is,” he said. “Our Russian passenger. Goga Golubkin.”

  79

  The flight to Trondheim wouldn’t take more than an hour and ten minutes. Max looked at Sofia, who was sitting next to him and looking straight ahead at the seat in front of her. Her boss had made calls to the Swedish Civil Aviation Administration and the director of Arlanda Airport, resulting in a permit allowing Sofia to bring her service pistol.

  Following the conversation with Hein Espen, Max had reached out to his friends at the main Norwegian navy base at Haakonsvern. He had called in an old favor to get help with the transportation they were going to need after they landed. They would be met on the runway in Trondheim. In order to avoid a lot of questions from the other passengers, he and Sofia would be let off the plane first.

  At the start of the flight, Sofia had told Max what Tomas Schiller had said with a self-satisfied grin at the meeting.

  “Perhaps you need to dig deeper?”

  Schiller had been right. Deeper in the sense of back to the previous generation.

  “Punishment for old sins.”

  How were Sweden’s politicos going to handle this if the murders were revenge for the extradition of the Balts? For what might be the most shameful episode in Sweden’s history?

  There was still a great deal that hadn’t come together.

  Evidence strongly suggested Kandinsky was the killer, but why should he of all people have committed these acts of revenge? He wasn
’t old enough to have experienced what happened in Sweden in the midforties. What was it that connected him to the people who’d been killed?

  And Maj-Lis? It looked like she had lied about her background, but Max still couldn’t understand how she fit into the picture.

  Most confusing of all were the Russians, the fingerprints, and the DNA. The Russian embassy had requested permanent police van monitoring. After their request was denied, the Swedish Security Service had noted that a real heavyweight had come to Sweden with a posse of military types. What was Papanov really doing in Sweden?

  Max leaned his head against the headrest. He didn’t close his eyes; instead, he looked up at the panel with reading lights and air valves above him. The lamps were on. The strong light gave him a burning sensation somewhere at the back of his head. Alprazolam could alleviate this feeling. Strangely enough, his brain seemed to be working better since he’d taken the pills Papanov had given him, despite the effects of the assault and the lack of sleep. He didn’t exactly feel calmer or less aggressive. But his head was clearer. Could that arrogant doctor have been right? Could the benzodiazepines have been prescribed to heal a defective head?

  On the lowered tray table in front of him lay the symbology book they’d brought with them. He began flipping through it. First distractedly, then with greater focus. He started when he came to a spread with a detailed illustration. The hairs on his arms stood up.

  “Look here,” he said, turning to Sofia. “This is Lietuvens’s cross, which Marju Bohl talked about. It’s decorated with other symbols positioned at each of the eight points. The cross with these symbols is described as ‘the individual’s preparations for death.’ From Mara, the mother of all.” Max pointed at the wave-shaped symbol inside the first point of the cross. “To Austras Koks, the tree of dawn.” He moved his finger to the last point. “If you follow the cross counterclockwise, the path takes you past a number of symbols we’ve seen on the murderer’s victims.”

  “Do you think he’s using this cross as a map? A sort of murderer’s zodiac?”

  Sofia followed Max’s index finger as he showed her the symbols for Meness, the moon god whose symbol was the inverted C and who had been divided in half, then the thunder god Perkons with his swastika, and the suns of the sun god Saule.