“Does it say anything about the mark on his back?”
Niels searched through the pages. “Not from what I can see. No cause of death is given, but it was designated a homicide.”
“Why’s that?”
Niels shrugged. “Maybe he had enemies.”
“It was probably Sharon who killed him.” Hannah smiled. “Because of what happened in 1988.”
“The incident in 1988.” Niels was thinking out loud. “What if the young Israeli soldier who released Talal Amar was . . .”
“Ludvig Goldberg.”
Niels nodded. For a moment, maybe for the first time since he had arrived, they looked each other in the eye.
Hannah said, “So that must be why the Italian policeman sent you the excerpt from Amar’s speech.”
Niels didn’t reply.
29
The veranda railing was covered with a thin layer of frost. Niels’s breath formed little clouds in the cold. He looked at Hannah through the windowpane. She was leaning over the map spread out on the coffee table. There was something very attractive about her profile. She was no more than six or seven feet away from him, but she was in another world. She was staring at the twelve X’s on the map. Niels thought about what they had just discussed. The fact that every X represented a Sarah Johnsson or a Ludvig Goldberg. A history. A fate. A life. Joys, sorrows, friends, acquaintances, and family. Each X was a story. With a beginning, a middle, and a sudden, brutal end.
A common eider duck dove into the surface of the sea. A moment later, it re-emerged, made a 180-degree turn, and headed south. Away from the wintry chill of Scandinavia. Niels watched it go with envy. He was trapped here, confined to an immense prison. What sort of psychological defect was serving as his prison guard? Fear? Trauma? Again he turned to look at Hannah. Somehow he felt as if he were in the process of discovering the answer to that question. He watched her use her cigarette to light another without taking her eyes off the map.
Niels’s fingers were stiff with cold as he took out his cell. A text message from Anni, asking him whether he’d contribute to a gift for Susanne from the archives division. She was turning fifty on Thursday. They wanted to get her a rowing machine or a certificate to a health spa in Hamburg.
“My beloved” was how he’d labeled Kathrine in his list of contacts. He tapped on her number. “You have reached Kathrine at DBB Architects.” He’d heard that message in English at least a thousand times, but he still listened to the very end. “I’m unable to take your call right now, but please leave me a message.” Then she switched to Danish. “And if it’s you, Mother, just be a dear and leave me a message.”
“Kathrine. It’s me.” Niels took a deep breath. “Well, I guess you can see that it’s me calling. I can fully understand why you don’t want to talk to me. I just want to say that this case I’m working on . . . I have a feeling that . . . I know it probably sounds stupid, but I feel like I’m on to something really important.”
Niels ended the call. He was right—it sounded stupid. But he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Homicide case: Vladimir Zhirkov
“Now we move on to Russia.” Niels was again sitting on the floor. “Or to be more precise, to Moscow. Vladimir Zhirkov, forty-eight years old.”
“Moscow. Okay.” Hannah put an X on the map.
“He was a journalist and social critic.”
“I didn’t think people were allowed to criticize society in Russia.” She sat down next to Niels.
“Zhirkov died on November twentieth of this year. According to a report from a Russian human rights organization called Memorial, he was incarcerated in the infamous Butyrka prison in Moscow.”
“What was he convicted of?”
Niels hesitated as he leafed through the report. “I don’t know, but I’m sure we’ll find out. When he was dying, he was discovered by a fellow prisoner named Igor Dasayev, who later recounted that during the afternoon and evening, Zhirkov had complained of being in pain. Dasayev called for help, and, er . . . there’s a lengthy text here. Zhirkov reportedly shouted, ‘There’s a fire in me’ and ‘It’s burning.’ Shortly after that he was declared dead. No autopsy. The end.” Niels got up from the floor and took a sip of cold coffee.
“What’s that?” Hannah pointed to a page on which the text had been reduced so much that the tiny words were practically jammed against each other. “Is that in English?”
Niels nodded. “I can hardly read it. It’s a newspaper article from The Moscow Times. From October 23, 2003. Listen to this: ‘October 23, 2002, is remembered for the attack’—” Niels stopped abruptly.
“What is it?”
“I think I’d better translate it instead.”
“I understand English.”
“Yes, but I’m feeling embarrassed about reading English to an astrophysicist.”
Hannah protested, but Niels insisted on picking his way through a translation. “ ‘On October 23, 2002, forty Chechen terrorists, under the leadership of Movsar Barayev, attacked the Dubrovka Theater, located only a few minutes from Red Square. Approximately nine hundred unsuspecting theatergoers were inside, waiting for the performance to begin, when they found themselves the main actors in a terror drama that sent shock waves throughout Russia. Among the heavily armed terrorists were many women, most of them with explosives strapped to their bodies. The terrorists demanded that all Russian forces be immediately withdrawn from Chechnya. Barayev further underscored his demands by declaring: “I swear by Allah that we are more prepared to die than to live.” The enormous amount of explosives and weapons that the terrorists had brought with them proved that they were ready to make good on their threats. Later investigations showed that there were at least a hundred and ten kilos of TNT inside the theater. It was estimated that about twenty kilos of TNT would have been enough to kill everyone in the theater. The Russian authorities had no idea what to do. Putin refused to yield, even as demands mounted from family members of the hostages insisting that something had to be done. One young woman, twenty-six-year-old Olga Romanova, succeeded in entering the theater in an attempt to persuade the captors to release the children. The terrorists replied by shooting her dead on the spot. Over the course of the next forty-eight hours, some of the hostages were released. A number of prominent citizens and organizations tried to initiate negotiations with the captors, including the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and the well-known journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The situation finally became so critical that in the early-morning hours of Saturday, October 26, 2002, Russian Spetsnaz security forces pumped large quantities of fentanyl-based gas into the theater and then stormed the building. The battle didn’t last long. Most of the people inside passed out from the gas. The security forces were taking no chances with the unconscious terrorists and shot every one of them, both men and women, through the head. Soon they were all dead. Afterward Russia was in shock. What at first glance looked like a victory turned out to be a tragedy of almost incomprehensible proportions. One hundred and twenty-nine hostages died, including ten children. Sixty-nine children were orphaned by the attack. Some of the hostages had been shot by the terrorists, but most of them had died from the gas or as a consequence of inadequate medical treatment given to the unconscious hostages after they were carried out of the theater. Only a few ambulances were on the scene, and people were not given the medical treatment they needed. Many suffocated in the overcrowded buses that took them away.’ ”
Niels found himself breathing hard as he set the article aside. He could picture the scene. The terrified children surrounded by terrorists, explosives, and loaded guns. The waiting. The fear. Maybe he’d seen a documentary on TV about the event.
“What does this have to do with Vladimir Zhirkov?” asked Hannah.
“Good question. Maybe he wrote the article. He was a journalist, after all.”
“But the Italian police officer could have sent you any number of articles he wrote.”
Niels nodded and
leafed through the pages of fragmentary information. “Zhirkov grew up in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. His mother was a nurse. His father committed suicide when Vladimir was a boy. Here’s a statement from an old team newsletter. I think it’s from a hockey coach: ‘Twelve-year-old Vladimir Zhirkov has great talent, but we need to work on his psyche if he’s to have any hope of a career in ice hockey. He has a tendency to appear resigned and depressed.’ I wonder why the Italian translated that? Here’s an excerpt from an interview from . . . it doesn’t say where it’s from. A newspaper or a magazine.”
“An interview with Zhirkov?” asked Hannah.
“Unfortunately, no. With a schoolteacher named Aleksey Saenko.”
“Who’s that?”
“He must have been one of the hostages in the theater. He says, ‘The nights inside the theater were the worst. We sat there in the rows of seats as if attending the performance of a nightmare that would never end. There were three dead bodies in the orchestra pit. One of them was a young man who had tried to flee when the terrorists forced their way in. He’d been shot in the stomach. I could see his intestines hanging out. For hours he lay there moaning, and when he died, I thought: Finally. His moans were enough to drive us all mad. The children cried the whole time. Their parents tried to comfort them. The terrorists walked around among us. In the middle of the theater they had placed an enormous pile of explosives. And I mean really enormous. It was a mountain of death. I was sitting only a few yards away from it, and I thought: We’re never going to get out of here alive. The leader of the terrorists, Barayev, seemed unbalanced. He had hand grenades strapped all over his body, and he might have been under the influence of some sort of drugs.’ ”
“ ‘I have come to Moscow to die,’ ” exclaimed Hannah.
“What?” Niels looked up.
“That’s what he said,” Hannah explained. “I remember it. ‘I have come to Moscow to die.’ That statement was repeated in the Danish newspapers.”
Niels continued reading: “ ‘At one point an incident occurred between a hostage and one of the terrorists. It was a young mother who had snapped under the pressure. She was holding two little boys on her lap. One of them was only a baby. The other—he may have been five—was shaking with fear. Suddenly, the mother jumped up and began shouting at the terrorists. She called them psychopaths, murderers, and cowards who couldn’t think of anything better to do than kill innocent women and children. The terrorists yanked the woman and her children into the aisle. The children screamed. There was no doubt they were about to be shot on the spot. But then a man stood up. He was sitting in the row behind the woman. A very young man. And he said that they could shoot him instead. I remember his exact words: “Let me take her bullet. I don’t have as much to lose.” A terrible silence settled over the theater. The whole place was holding its breath. The terrorist hesitated. Finally, he nodded and escorted the woman and her children back to their seats. The young man stepped forward. He seemed completely calm. That’s the clearest image that I have from those horrific days inside the theater: the calm expression on the man’s face as he stepped forward to be shot. Barayev went over to him. At the time I didn’t know his name, but it was clear that he was the leader. He started yelling. About the crimes committed against the Chechen people. About the Russians’ ruthless actions in Grozny. He was raging. His entire family had been wiped out by the Russians. Hatred flamed from his eyes as he raised his gun and pressed it to the forehead of the young man, and then . . . nothing. Nothing happened. He didn’t pull the trigger. The young man looked him in the eye, calmly waiting for the inevitable. But nothing happened. The young man took his seat again as the other terrorists looked at each other in astonishment. Why hadn’t Barayev shot the man? What had made him hesitate? Of course, I can’t answer that question. But there was something about that young man. Some sort of aura about him. Something in his eyes. I have no doubt that on that day in the Dubrovka Theater, I witnessed a genuine miracle.’ ”
“This is a picture of the woman and her kids?” Hannah picked up a photograph.
“I assume so.” Niels looked at the beautiful mother and her two children. The younger one was no longer an infant. “This must have been taken a couple of years after the tragedy.”
“Are you thinking the same thing I am?” Niels couldn’t tell whether that was a smile on Hannah’s face.
“Yes,” he said. “The young man in the theater was Zhirkov. He saved the lives of the mother and her children.”
“So why did he end up in prison? He was a hero, after all.”
Niels pondered the question. A long pause ensued. Hannah got up and went over to the map where the X’s were scattered all over the world, seemingly at random.
“Maybe the experience inside the theater made him criticize the Russian system.” Niels was thinking out loud. “And that’s why the group called Memorial took an interest in him.”
“You mean he was imprisoned because he was critical of the regime?”
“Possibly.”
“Then who murdered him?”
Niels was holding another page. “This looks like a printout from an Internet paper. Possibly published by Memorial.”
He translated what it said. “Officially, it’s still a mystery as to who murdered Vladimir Zhirkov, but in the mind of the well-known social critic and chess genius Garry Kasparov, the matter is quite clear. He has stated, ‘Putin killed Zhirkov.’ But Zhirkov’s fellow prisoner Igor Dasayev, who found his body, has a different explanation. ‘On the night before the murder of Vladimir Zhirkov, I saw a man—the shadow of a man—standing right next to the sleeping Zhirkov. I don’t know how he got into the cell, and I don’t know what he was doing. But I’m pretty sure he had something to do with Zhirkov’s death. It was very scary. Like in a horror movie.’ ”
“I think it sounds good when you speak English.”
Niels smiled wryly. “How could anybody get into his cell? The Butyrka prison is heavily guarded. It doesn’t sound credible.”
“Does it say anything about the mark on his back?”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
30
City Center—Copenhagen
The pastor was in his office. Abdul Hadi could see him clearly because the office faced the garden, which was open to the public. Abdul Hadi sat down on a bench a short distance away. A day-care center was right next to the church. There were children and staff inside. Why hadn’t his fat cousin mentioned that fact? Not that it would have changed anything; he had decided on his plan, even though he regretted not being able to blow up the church. It would have looked good: the facade of the church facing the famous pedestrian street blasted to smithereens. Photos of smashed shop windows and a destroyed church with a dead pastor inside would have traveled around the world in record time. Copenhagen would have been added to the list on the new map of the world. A world map showing more and more victories. Things were moving in the right direction. The West’s own decadence was about to make it implode. A life based on the exploitation of others and the perverse sexual pursuit of children. Children! Abdul Hadi could see it in all of the mannequins posed in the big shop windows. Tiny little breasts, not yet sexually mature; some of the mannequins weren’t wearing any clothes at all, but apparently, that didn’t bother anyone. People were walking around carrying big packages—their religion was centered around consumerism. On their most important religious holiday, they ate pork, gave a grotesque number of presents to their children, and complained that there was no democracy in the Middle East. Abdul Hadi regretted that his brother had ever come to this place. To Europe. But his death had to be avenged.
Abdul Hadi stuck his hand in his pocket. The knife was still there. His cousin had brought it along to the airport. His fat cousin had been embarrassed that Abdul Hadi had been forced to jump off the train, and he’d almost refused to drive Abdul across the bridge from Sweden to Denmark. A sleeping army. Abdul Hadi had chewed his cousin out. Shouted at him in the car when h
e said that he wasn’t happy about driving him.
A Santa Claus walked past with children running after him. Abdul Hadi got up and headed for the church.
The church was empty. A big wooden cross with a Christ figure hung on the wall. This was where he planned to leave the pastor when he was done with him. It was also an image that would end up on the front pages of the Western newspapers. Iconography. That was important. People in the West defined themselves solely through external things. Clothes, appearance, mirrors, pictures, TV, advertisements. Abdul Hadi silently chanted the litany that had been instilled in him as he took note of the church’s layout. People in the West had no interior dialogue, no conversations with God.
A woman said something to him but realized at once that he didn’t speak Danish. Switching to English, she said, “The church is closing.” She smiled and added, “Friday night there’s a midnight service, if you’re interested.”
“Thank you.”
He went back outside. The lights were off in the day-care center. The church was closed. Abdul Hadi walked around to the sacristy, where a window had been prepared for him. He would have preferred to say a prayer first, but there wasn’t time. He had seen the pastor put on his jacket. It had to be now.
31
Helsingør—Denmark
Hannah poured the coffee, spilling a little on the table. She wiped it up with a dishrag. “Is that all?” she asked.
“Yes. Twenty-one cases.”
“From Antarctica to Caracas. With detours to Africa and Asia.” Finally, she looked at him. “In theory, there could be more.”
“Why do you say that?”
The Last Good Man Page 16