“He would never have stooped to accepting a bribe.”
“I mean that he was a keen-eyed police officer.”
“If his eyes were too keen, if that’s what sent him to his death, I trust Colonel Putnis will establish this shortly.”
“Who is this man that you’ve arrested?”
“Someone we’ve often come across in circumstances in which the two dead men were involved. A former butcher from Riga who has been one of the leaders of the organized crime we’ve been fighting against constantly. Remarkably enough, he’s always managed to avoid going to prison—but maybe we can nail him this time.”
The car slowed down and stopped by a wharf with piles of scrap iron and abandoned cranes. They got out of the car and walked to the water’s edge.
“That’s where Major Liepa was found.”
Wallander looked around, trying to establish basic facts.
How had the murderers and the major gotten here? Why just here? It wasn’t good enough to say that this part of the docks was remote. Wallander inspected the remains of what had once been a crane. Please, Baiba Liepa had written. Murniers had lit a cigarette and was stamping his feet rhythmically to keep warm.
Why doesn’t he want to tell me about where the crime actually took place? Wallander thought. Why does Baiba Liepa want to meet me in secret? When somebody telephones and asks for Mr. Eckers. . . . What am I really doing here in Riga?
The anxiety he’d felt that morning had returned. He wondered whether it had to do with the fact that he was a stranger in an unknown country. The job of a police officer was to deal with circumstances of which oneself was a part. Here, he was an outsider. Perhaps he could penetrate this foreign environment in the guise of Mr. Eckers? Kurt Wallander was a Swedish police officer, and he felt helpless in these alien circumstances. He went back to the car.
“I’d like to study your documentation,” he said. “The postmortem, forensic reports, photos.”
“We shall have all the papers translated,” Murniers said.
“It might be quicker if I have an interpreter,” Wallander suggested. “Sergeant Zids speaks excellent English.”
Murniers smiled wryly and lit another cigarette.
“You are in a hurry,” he said. “You’re impatient. Of course Sergeant Zids can translate the reports for you.”
When they got back to police headquarters, they’d gone behind a curtain and watched Colonel Putnis and the man he was interrogating through a two-way mirror. The interrogation room was cold and furnished with only a small wooden table and two chairs. Colonel Putnis had taken off his tunic. The man sitting opposite him was unshaven and looked exhausted. His answers to Putnis’s questions were very slow.
“This will take some time,” Murniers said pensively, “but we’ll get to the truth sooner or later.”
“What truth?”
“Whether or not we’re right.”
They returned to the inner sanctum of the labyrinth, and Wallander was shown to a small office in the same corridor as Murniers’s. Sergeant Zids arrived with a file on the investigation into the major’s death. Before Murniers left them to get on with it, he and the sergeant exchanged a few words in Latvian.
“Baiba Liepa will be brought here for an interrogation at 2 p.m. this afternoon,” said Murniers.
Wallander was horrified. You have betrayed me, Mr. Eckers. Why did you do that?
“What I had in mind was a conversation,” Wallander said. “Not an interrogation.”
“I shouldn’t have used the word ‘interrogation,’ ” Murniers said. “Allow me to explain that she indicated she would be delighted to see you.”
Murniers left, and two hours later Zids had translated all the documents in the file. Wallander had examined the blurred photographs of Liepa’s body, and his feeling that something vital was missing was reinforced. Since he knew he could think more clearly when he was doing something else, he asked the sergeant to drive him to a shop where he could buy long johns. The sergeant didn’t appear surprised at his request. Wallander was struck by the absurdity of the whole situation as he marched into the clothing store selected by the sergeant: it was as if he were buying underpants with a police escort. Zids did the talking for him, and insisted that Wallander should try on the long johns before paying for them. He bought two pairs, and they were duly wrapped up in brown paper and tied with string. When they emerged into the street, he suggested they should have lunch.
“Not at the Latvia Hotel, though,” he said. “Anywhere else, but not there.”
Sergeant Zids turned off the main street and drove into the old town. It seemed to Wallander that he was entering a new labyrinth he would never be able to find his way out of alone.
They stopped at the Sigulda restaurant. Wallander had an omelette, and the sergeant a bowl of soup. The atmosphere was stifling and heavy with cigarette smoke. The place was full when they arrived, and Wallander had noted that the sergeant had demanded a table.
“This would have been impossible in Sweden,” he said as they were eating. “I mean, a police officer marching into a crowded restaurant and demanding a table.”
“It’s different here,” Sergeant Zids said, unconcerned. “People prefer to keep on the good side of the police.”
Wallander could feel himself getting annoyed. Sergeant Zids was too young for such arrogance.
“I don’t want to cut any lines in the future,” he said.
The sergeant stared at him in astonishment.
“Then we won’t get any food,” he said.
“The dining room at the Latvia Hotel is always empty,” Wallander replied curtly.
They were back at police headquarters just before 2 p.m. During the meal Wallander had sat there without speaking, trying to establish in his mind just what was wrong with the report Zids had translated. He had concluded that what worried him was the very perfection of the whole thing—it was as if it had been written in such a way as to make questions unnecessary. That was as far as he had gotten, and he wasn’t sure he was right. Maybe he was seeing ghosts where there weren’t any?
Murniers wasn’t in his office and Colonel Putnis was still busy with his interrogation. The sergeant went to fetch Baiba Liepa, leaving Wallander alone in his office. He wondered if it was bugged, if someone was observing him through a two-way mirror. As if to assert his innocence, he took off his trousers and put on his long johns. He had just noticed how his legs were starting to itch when there was a knock on the door. He shouted, “Come in,” and the sergeant ushered in Baiba Liepa. I’m not Mr. Eckers. There’s no such person as Mr. Eckers. That’s exactly why I want to talk to you.
“Does Major Liepa’s widow speak English?” he asked the sergeant.
Zids nodded.
“Then you can leave us alone.”
He had tried to prepare himself. I must remember that everything I say and do can be monitored. We can’t even put our fingers over our lips, let alone write notes. But Baiba Liepa has to understand that Mr. Eckers still exists.
She was dressed in a dark overcoat and a fur hat. Unlike earlier in the day, she was wearing glasses. She took off her hat, and shook out her dark hair.
“Please sit down, Mrs. Liepa,” Wallander said. She immediately smiled, a quick smile, as if he’d sent her a secret signal with a flashlight. He noted that she accepted it with no trace of surprise, but rather as if she’d expected nothing different. He knew he had to put to her all the questions he already had answers to. Perhaps she could send him a message through her responses, some insight into what was being held back for the eyes of Mr. Eckers only?
He expressed his sympathy—formally, but sincerely even so. Then he asked the questions that were natural in the circumstances, bearing in mind all the time that some unknown person would be monitoring them.
“How long were you married to Major Liepa?”
“For eight years.”
“If I understand correctly, you didn’t have any children.”
“We wanted to wait.
I have my career.”
“What is your career, Mrs. Liepa?”
“I’m an engineer. But these last few years I’ve spent most of my time translating scientific papers. Some of them for our technical university.”
How did you arrange serving me breakfast? he wondered. Who is your contact at the Latvia Hotel? The thought distracted him. He asked his next question.
“And you thought you couldn’t combine that with having children?”
He regretted asking that question right away. That was a private matter, irrelevant. He apologized by not waiting for an answer, but just pressing on.
“Mrs. Liepa,” he said. “You must have thought, worried, wondered about what really happened to your husband. I’ve had the interrogations you had with the police translated. You say you don’t know anything, don’t understand anything, have no idea about anything. I’m sure that’s the case. Nobody wants your husband’s murderer to be caught and punished more than you do. Nevertheless, I’d like you to think back one more time, to the day when your husband got back from Sweden. There might be something you overlooked because of the shock of hearing that your husband had been murdered.”
Her reply gave him the first coded signal for him to interpret.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten anything. Nothing at all.” Herr Eckers, I wasn’t shocked by something unexpected. What happened was what we’d feared.
“Maybe a bit earlier, then,” Wallander said. He would have to tread very carefully now, so as not to make it too difficult for her.
“My husband didn’t speak about his work,” she said. “He would never break the oath of silence he’d taken when he became a police officer. I was married to a man whose morals were of a very high standard.”
Absolutely, Wallander thought. It was the very high standard of his morals that killed him. “I had exactly the same impression of Major Liepa,” he said, “despite the fact that we only met for a couple of days in Sweden.”
Did she understand now that he was on her side? That he’d asked her to come and see him for that very reason? So that he could lay out a smokescreen of questions that didn’t mean anything?
He repeated his request for her to search again through her recollections. They batted questions and answers to and fro for a while until Wallander decided it was time to stop. He rang a bell, assuming that Sergeant Zids would be listening for it, then stood up and shook her hand.
How did you know I’d come to Riga, he wondered. Somebody must have told you. Somebody who wanted us to meet. But why? What is it you think a police officer from an insignificant little Swedish town will be able to do to help you?
The sergeant appeared to escort Baiba Liepa to some distant exit. Wallander stood at the drafty window and looked into the courtyard. Sleet was falling over the city, and beyond the high wall he could see church steeples and the occasional high-rise building. He suddenly had the feeling that he’d let himself get carried away without allowing his reason to come up with objections, that it was all in his imagination. He was suspecting conspiracies where there weren’t any, he’d swallowed the unfounded myth about the Eastern bloc dictatorships being based on the pitting of one citizen against another. What justification had he for mistrusting Murniers and Putnis? The fact that Baiba Liepa had turned up at his hotel disguised as a chambermaid could have an explanation that proved to be much less dramatic than he’d imagined.
His train of thought was broken by a knock on the door. It was Colonel Putnis. He seemed tired, and his smile was strained.
“The interrogation of the suspect has been temporarily adjourned,” he said. “Unfortunately the suspect has not made the confessions we had hoped for. We are now checking various pieces of information he has given us, and then I’ll resume the cross-examination.”
“What are you basing your suspicions on?” Wallander asked.
“In the past he often used Leja and Kalns as couriers and henchmen,” Putnis said. “We hope to be able to prove that they’ve been drug smuggling this last year. Hagelman, as he’s called, is the type who wouldn’t hesitate to torture or murder his colleagues if he thought it necessary. He hasn’t been acting alone, of course: we’re looking for other members of his gang at present. Many of them are Soviet citizens, so they might well be in their own country now, unfortunately. But we’re not going to give up. We’ve also found several weapons Hagelman had access to, and we’re looking into whether the bullets that killed Leja and Kalns came from any of them.”
“What about the connection with Major Liepa’s murder,” Wallander asked. “Where does that fit in?”
“We don’t know,” Putnis replied, “but it was a planned killing, an execution. He wasn’t even robbed. We have to conclude that it had something to do with his work.”
“Could Major Liepa have been leading a double life?” Wallander asked.
Putnis smiled wearily.
“We live in a country where awareness of what our fellow citizens do has become an art form,” he said. “That is no less true in the case of fellow police officers. If Major Liepa had been leading a double life, we’d have known about it.”
“Unless somebody was protecting him,” Wallander said.
Putnis stared at him in astonishment.
“Who could have been protecting him?”
“I don’t know,” Wallander said. “Just thinking aloud. Not a particularly well-founded thought, I’m afraid.”
Putnis got up to leave.
“I had intended to invite you to our house for dinner this evening,” he said, “but unfortunately that won’t be possible as I have to go on with the interrogation. Perhaps Colonel Murniers had the same idea? It would be most impolite of us to leave you to your own devices in a strange town.”
“The Latvia Hotel is splendid,” Wallander said. “Besides, I’d planned to summarize the thoughts I’ve had about the death of Major Liepa. That will take all evening.”
Putnis nodded.
“Tomorrow evening, then,” he said. “I’d like you to come and meet my family. Ausma, my wife, is an excellent cook.”
“I’d like that,” Wallander said. “That would be very nice.”
Putnis left, and Wallander rang the bell. He wanted to get out of the police headquarters before Murniers had a chance to invite him home, or maybe to some restaurant or another.
“I’d like to go back to the hotel now,” Wallander said when Zids appeared in the doorway. “I have quite a lot of notes to write up in my room this evening. You can come and collect me at 8 a.m. tomorrow.”
When the sergeant had left him at his hotel, Wallander bought some postcards and stamps in reception. He also asked for a map of the city, but the map the hotel had was not detailed enough, and he was directed to a bookstore not far away.
Wallander looked around in the foyer, but couldn’t see anyone drinking tea or reading a newspaper. That means they’re still here, he thought. One day they’ll be obvious, the next they’ll be invisible. I’m supposed to doubt whether the shadows exist.
He left the hotel and went in search of the bookstore. It was already dark, and the pavement was wet from sleet. There were a lot of people about, and Wallander stopped now and then to look in shop windows. The goods on display were limited, and hard to tell apart. When he got to the bookstore, he glanced back over his shoulder: there was no sign of anybody hesitating mid-stride.
An elderly gentleman who didn’t speak a word of English sold him a map of Riga. He went on and on in Latvian, as if he took it for granted that Wallander could understand every word. He returned to his hotel. Somewhere in front of him was a shadow he couldn’t see. He made up his mind to ask one of the colonels the next day why he was being watched. He thought he’d broach the subject in a friendly fashion, without sarcasm or aggression.
He asked at reception if anybody had tried to contact him. “No calls, Mr. Wallander, no calls at all,” was the answer.
He went up to his room and sat down to write his postc
ards, moving the desk away from the window, to avoid the draft. He chose a card with a picture of Riga Cathedral to send to Björk. Baiba Liepa lived somewhere not far from there; late one evening the major had taken a telephone call and been summoned. Who made that call, Baiba? Mr. Eckers is in his room, waiting for an answer to that question.
He wrote cards to Björk, Linda and his father. He hesitated about the last of his cards, then decided to send greetings to his sister, Kristina.
It was 7 p.m. now. He filled his bath with lukewarm water, and balanced a glass of whisky on the edge of the tub. Then he closed his eyes and started to go through the whole thing, from the very beginning. The life raft, the dead men, the peculiar embrace they were in. He tried to find something he’d missed earlier. Rydberg used to talk about the ability to see what was invisible. Observing what was odd in what seemed to be natural. He went methodically through the whole case. Where were the clues he just couldn’t see?
When he’d finished his bath he sat at his desk and started to make more notes. He felt sure the two Latvian police colonels were on the right track. There was nothing to contradict the theory that the men in the life raft had been punished for an internal indiscretion. It didn’t really matter that they had been shot in their shirtsleeves and then flung into a life raft. He didn’t believe any more that whoever did this intended the bodies to be found.
Why was the life raft stolen? he wrote. By whom? How was it possible for Latvian criminals to get to Sweden so easily? Was the theft carried out by Swedes, or by Latvians in Sweden with Swedish contacts? Major Liepa had been murdered the very night he got back from Sweden. There was plenty to suggest he’d been silenced. What did Major Liepa know? he wrote. And why am I being given a thoroughly unsatisfactory account of the case, which avoids establishing where the murder took place? Baiba Liepa, he wrote. What does she know but doesn’t want to tell the police?
He slid his notes to one side and poured himself another glass of whisky. It was nearly 9 p.m., and he was hungry. He picked up the telephone receiver to check that it was working, then went down to reception and informed them he was in the dining room if anybody called. When he got to the dining room, he was shown to the same table as before. Maybe there’s a microphone in the ashtray, he thought ironically. Maybe there’s somebody under the table, taking my pulse? He drank half a bottle of Armenian wine with his roast chicken and potatoes. Every time the swing doors opened, he thought it might be the receptionist coming to tell him somebody had phoned. He took a glass of brandy with his coffee, and looked around the dining room. Quite a few of the tables were occupied tonight. There were some Russians in one corner, and a party of Germans at a long table together with their Latvian hosts. It was nearly 10:30 p.m. when he paid his incredibly low bill, and he wondered for just a moment whether he ought to look in at the nightclub. Then he thought better of it and walked up the stairs to the 15th floor.
The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery Page 12