Ten Swedes Must Die

by Martin Österdahl

  Sofia looked at him questioningly.

  “We got him, Max. Hasn’t that sunk in? Not everything has been cleared up, but don’t you think maybe we should celebrate this victory?”

  Max couldn’t stop thinking of Charlie as Hein Espen had described him. He saw no reason to celebrate before he knew whether he had, in fact, saved his friend’s life.

  “Some other night,” he said. He walked toward the subway.

  93

  At Vektor, Sarah stepped out of the bathroom and over to the little table in the kitchen where Max was sitting. She had washed off the eye makeup that had run when Max had told her the news.

  It wasn’t over for Charlie just yet. But he was getting the best care he could.

  “So Tomas Schiller was the only person who checked out the book from the City Library?” said Max.

  Sarah nodded. “Something’s rotten in the state of Sweden.”

  Max didn’t bother to comment on her Shakespeare paraphrase.

  “Our theory worked for Lindström, too,” he said.

  Sarah nodded. “Lindström’s father was the head of the C-Bureau department known as the men in black,” she said.

  “And Maj-Lis?” asked Max.

  “There I’ve gotten nothing. I still don’t see how she, or Kandinsky for that matter, comes into the picture.”

  Max knew there was a connection somehow, via the SS bracelet, the slip of paper with the address in Riga on it, and the Triin, which had sailed under the protection of the C-Bureau and the Nazis. Maj-Lis had been a part of that story, which seemed somehow to be behind the murders. But if the murders were really vengeance for sins committed during that time, what sin was Maj-Lis responsible for? She had been a refugee herself.

  Sarah held up a piece of paper. “Have you read this? I copied a page from De vi vårdade. It’s a kind of formal complaint against Sweden.”

  She handed the document to Max. It had been handwritten in Swedish; the writing was old fashioned.

  Max began reading.

  I accuse Sweden.

  Of hiding actions crueler than those of the Bolsheviks and the Nazis behind words like humanity and compassion.

  Of not even allowing men to die.

  Of lying and misleading us over a period of nine months with fake evaluations and empty promises.

  Of imprisoning us—people who had already been subjected to occupation by two different foreign powers at home—behind barbed wire.

  Of paying for your own war sins by selling us to the Russians.

  Of the murders of our brothers, whose numbers we are still counting.

  Of the destruction to which our lands were subjected, which can be compared only to the destruction caused by the weapons of death the Americans dropped on Japan.

  For all of this, you will be made to pay.

  Latvians will always remain Latvians.

  God bless the Baltics.

  “Was such a complaint ever brought before a court of law? You would think we would have heard about that.”

  Sarah shrugged.

  “It’s signed with a man’s name,” said Max. “Ludwigs Ozols. But it doesn’t look like a man’s handwriting.”

  “Maybe a woman helped him write the letter.”

  “Someone who knew Swedish,” said Max. “Does the name Ludwigs Ozols ring any bells?”

  “Yes, it does. He was one of the prisoners mentioned in the book.”

  Max reached for the book, flipped through it from the back, and got no further than the afterword before he found Ozols’s name.

  Other Latvian legionaries described Ozols as a leader, an almost mythical figure seen as a hero of the nation. He’d performed great deeds against the Russians, in a Nazi uniform but always with his heart beating for the land the legionaries dreamed of, sang songs about when they were sitting around the fire at night. Aistia, the land that had never existed but would one day be created, a land some people on the other side of the Baltic had dreamed about since the time of the Romans. A strong pan-Baltic state that would constitute the promised land described in ancient verses. It was the Russians who had stood in the way of a unified Baltic nation. The legionaries had hoped for support from the West but had fallen victim to the conditions of the peace. When Europe was divided up among the victorious powers, no one cared to listen to what the Balts wanted.

  Max thought about what the professor in Tartu had said about the symbols some men tattooed on their bodies. The third national awakening. The cross with symbols of gods he’d seen inked on the murderer’s back.

  The murderer’s map.

  According to the book, Ludwigs Ozols had been forced to board the Soviet vessel Beloostrov. He had subsequently spent many years in Kolyma in Siberia, in the most notorious of all the camps, the one Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had called the pole of the gulags’ cold and cruelty.

  So Ludwigs Ozols had survived up there, in that cold pit of hell, in a climate as harsh as Antarctica’s?

  He looked up from the book.

  “Did you read the afterword?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “There’s a lot that fits here with this Ludwigs Ozols,” said Max.

  “Could he be alive?”

  “Seems impossible given what he was subjected to. If he is, he’s very old.”

  He took out the symbology book and flipped to the illustration he’d shown Sofia on the plane to Trondheim. “This is what we think the murderer is following.”

  “These symbols are related to the old Baltic religion?”

  “Yes, but this is more about nationalism than religion. The killings follow it precisely.”

  Sarah put her finger on the symbol drawn at the cross’s fifth point, the symbol of Laima.

  “So it was this symbol that…that he put on Charlie?”

  “Yes,” said Max. “Three downward-pointing arrows. The symbol of fate.”

  She gulped, tried to shake it off.

  “There are three steps left on this cross?” Sarah asked.

  Max nodded. “But Kandinsky’s locked up now.”

  “Where’s Pashie?”

  Max swallowed.

  “I called her before I went to Trondheim,” he said. “She’s safe with her friends.”

  94

  Sofia chose not to look at Kandinsky for longer than a moment when she stepped into the interview room. She wasn’t counting on ever finding out what her colleagues at the Swedish Security Service had subjected him to during the last few hours, what questions they’d asked or what methods they’d used. But she was sure they’d concluded that he wasn’t a Russian spy named Goga Golubkin and that this wasn’t a case for them.

  Sofia could see that the wound on his shoulder was causing him a great deal of pain, but it certainly wasn’t life-threatening. No doubt some people would find it problematic that the police had interviewed him so soon after he had received emergency medical treatment. But it was as Per Carpelan had said: when they were dealing with the murders of highly placed officials, the police could bend the rules.

  She sat down directly across from Kandinsky. He looked at her without emotion, seemed entirely collected inside his shell. His wreath of neck tattoos was partially visible above the collar of the T-shirt the Swedish Security Service had given him when they’d taken the Russian uniform.

  Sofia laid out photographs of his naked body on the table between them. The cross on his back with the symbols of the gods at the ends looked just like the one in the symbology book.

  His brown eyes were small; his gaze was cloudy, as if from substance abuse or hard living. He was a little over fifty, but his body was fit and looked younger. The artist had done a good job with the Identi-Kit picture based on Elias’s testimony. There could be no doubt that this was the man they’d been looking for ever since the murder at Berga.

  She knew her boss was standing on the other side of the one-way glass and following her interview. In the interest of following protocol, she pressed the Record button.

  “
Shall we start by establishing your name?” Sofia said in English. “I suppose we can retire John.”

  Kandinsky showed no reaction.

  “I understand you’re good with a pen and needle. Perhaps you’d rather answer by drawing on a piece of paper. We can arrange that, Kandinsky.”

  The man displayed no reaction whatsoever.

  “Would you like me to call you Oto Zagars?” asked Sofia, trying the name they’d gotten from Ludmars Kaldenis at DISS in Copenhagen.

  Still the man said nothing.

  “When you boarded the Seaway Eagle, you identified yourself as Goga Golubkin. Is that your real name?”

  Same result. Nothing.

  Sofia had a feeling things would continue like this. He wouldn’t say a word until someone forced him to. Nothing but violence would get him to open his mouth.

  Sofia decided she would nevertheless ask the questions she had prepared. If nothing else, the recording would serve as documentation of the path her investigation had taken.

  “According to information the police received, you traveled to the Trondheim harbor from the city center in a taxi. But we have witnesses who saw you arrive at the Radisson hotel in your own car. After you left it, the car was moved, and the police are now looking for it. Can you tell me what happened to it?”

  No answer.

  “Can you tell me who came and moved it? It’s of great importance to the investigation that we get access to it. Telling us where it is could make things easier for you.”

  Kandinsky smiled a little but remained silent.

  95

  The sun had already come up when Max got home. He felt a stabbing sensation in his ribs as he hung up his clothes. Pashie’s bomber jacket wasn’t hanging where it usually was. The apartment was utterly silent. Presumably she was still at the Marklunds’ place.

  He went into the kitchen, opened the cabinet over the refrigerator, and took out a bottle of whiskey and poured himself a large shot. When he went into the bedroom, he saw that Pashie had left dresser drawers pulled open. How long did she plan to stay with the Marklunds? He went over to the dresser. She had taken all her underwear.

  Something was wrong. He took out his cell phone, called her number but got her voice mail.

  On the unmade bed lay a brown cardboard envelope. It was just like the one the messenger had delivered to him at Vektor. He set his glass on the night table and opened it.

  He saw himself leaning over a hotel reception counter. Behind him stood Sofia in her snug-fitting jeans and brown leather jacket. He was smiling, giving the reception guy a thumbs-up. The next photograph showed Max and Sofia hurrying into an elevator. Max remembered how they had joked with each other.

  The last photograph showed Max and Sofia at their table in the Amaranten restaurant, their heads close together.

  My God, Pashie. Someone’s trying to drive us apart.

  A strategic genius with a manipulative mind.

  Max picked up his glass and drained it.

  Papanov.

  Kolyma, Siberia, February 1952

  Ozols looked up through the metal bars at the black sky. It was a clear night, and the temperature would fall to under thirty degrees below zero. He had lost count of how many times the guards had put him in the cage. This time he’d been permitted to keep his underpants. They hadn’t shown the same consideration to the stinking Russian with whom he was sharing one square meter of frost-covered floor and walls.

  They sat as prisoners always did in the isolation cell, with their backs to each other and their elbows linked. Through the night they moved as a unit—stood up, walked in place, did squats, and then sat down again. Several times Ozols had to tell his fellow prisoner to avoid moving too quickly. Your body wanted to move fast, but if you did that in this cold, you soon became exhausted. If you surrendered to sleep, you would never wake up again.

  Ozols’s crime this time had been opposing the construction of a new barrack on the tundra. As the camp’s construction leader, he had protested the plan after the work team had discovered that it was impossible to drive the posts into the ground—not because of the permafrost but because the dirt was full of skulls. On the afternoon when Ozols was forced to enter the cage, he heard dynamite explosions from the new area. That was how the camp director had decided to solve the problem. The remains of the men who’d lost their lives in the camp had been transformed into grit and dust.

  Six years had passed since the Beloostrov had taken him away from Sweden. He had been found guilty of engaging in anti-Soviet activities during his internment in Sweden and placed in a freight car with hundreds of other prisoners after having been forced to walk to a remote train-station area in the wilderness. Of the five hundred men who walked through the snow with Ozols in the winter of 1946, about half reached the freight cars. The dead had been bound to the backs of horse-drawn wagons with ropes and dragged along as provisions for the surviving prisoners.

  His physical strength and leadership qualities had helped him to survive. He spent his free time reading Soviet scientific journals; the articles about technological advances kept his brain active.

  This winter was as harsh as the winter of 1946. The work shifts had gotten longer with each passing year and each new camp director who wanted to send positive reports to Stalin in Moscow. The Russian who was rubbing his hairy back against Ozols’s had been put in the cage for refusing to dump a comrade’s frozen body into a hole in the ice, a burial method that had become more and more common since access to dynamite had been restricted.

  The Russian’s fingertips had become black. That was the last stage of serious hypothermia, when the tissue had died and a person’s fingers had turned into a bird’s claws. The man hadn’t spent more than two years in the camp, and already his days were numbered.

  “You have to amputate,” said Ozols.

  “Amputation!” The Russian laughed at him. “Surely you don’t think the doctor wants to waste a sharp blade? And I guess you know what happens to an enemy of the people when he no longer has hands to work with?”

  The same thing that will happen if you allow the rot to spread to the rest of your body, thought Ozols. You die.

  Ozols had noticed that the skin around the fingers on his left hand had thickened. He’d dropped his gloves somewhere in the deep snow while he was working on construction, and had been forced to work without them. He feared that the change in the skin was an early stage of hypothermia. He had to do something about it before he met the same fate as the Russian next to him.

  Two days later, having been released from the cage the previous day, Ozols was given permission to visit the nemetski, the German, the new doctor who had come to the camp around the beginning of the year. After breakfast he walked around the dining hall building, past the woodshed, and on to the doctor’s office at the back of the building.

  Ozols had seen the short, hollow-eyed man who walked around in his loneliness with his Trotsky-style eyeglass frames balanced on his nose. Rumor had it that the German was not only a doctor but also a prominent scientist. He had worked on a dangerous weapon for the Russians after the war had ended, and to ensure that he didn’t defect to the West, he had been sent here, to the end of the world, it was said. No one wanted to talk to an ex-Nazi. He wouldn’t last long without someone to protect him.

  “What do you say, Doctor?” asked Ozols.

  He was sitting on a stool, his hands on a little table illuminated by a powerful lamp.

  “Ozols?” said the German. “A Latvian name?”

  “Fifteenth Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.”

  The doctor raised his eyebrows. “You’ve lasted longer than most.”

  “How did you end up here, Doctor? It’s said you’re a scientist.”

  The doctor nodded.

  “It’s correct that I was one. Now I’m a simple surgeon.”

  “Weapons technology?”

  “A nuclear physicist. After the war I offered the Russians my services. The greatest mistak
e of my life.”

  The rumors were true, then.

  “How much time do I have?” asked Ozols.

  “How long would you like to live?”

  “Longer than Stalin,” he answered.

  The doctor shook his head. “If one is to believe the Russian people, he’s a god who will never die.”

  “Allow me to doubt that. How long would you like to live, German?”

  Ozols’s way of emphasizing German made the doctor look at him with a blank expression.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I give you two months at most. By then our criminal chief at the barracks, the man who takes care of the dirty work for the guards, will have seen to it that your time on earth has ended. There’s nothing they hate more than Nazis. If you don’t have protection, it will be no problem for them to get rid of someone like you.”

  “How would I acquire such protection?” asked the doctor.

  “There’s only one person here who would be willing and able to provide it.”

  “Fifteenth Grenadier Division?”

  “Exactly,” said Ozols.

  He unbuttoned his shirt and took out an article he’d brought with him from the barrack. He laid it in front of the doctor.

  “A mechanical prosthesis?” said the doctor. “I know about the technology, but how am I to get one here?”

  “I’m sure a prominent nuclear physicist like you can come up with a way,” said Ozols. “If your survival depends on it.”

  The doctor read on.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But they don’t allow me to carry out amputations here.”

  “I know,” said Ozols. “I read in the article that the amputation must be carried out in the correct manner if the prosthesis is to function properly.”

  “That’s correct. It must be possible to attach the muscles to the machinery.”

  “Take out a pen,” said Ozols.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Take out your pen.” Ozols nodded at the pen sticking out of the German’s breast pocket. “Draw a line on my left arm where the amputation must be done.”