The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  “Karlis must have had somebody he trusted among his colleagues,” he said.

  “We never socialized with other police officers,” she said. “We had friends from different circles.”

  “Think hard,” he urged her. “There must have been somebody he had coffee with now and then. It doesn’t need to have been a friend. It’ll be enough if you can remember somebody who wasn’t his enemy.”

  She tried to think, and he gave her time. His plan depended on the major having had somebody he might not have trusted, exactly, but didn’t distrust.

  “He sometimes mentioned Mikelis,” she said, still thinking hard. “A young sergeant who wasn’t like the rest of them. But I don’t know anything about him.”

  “You must know something, surely? Why did Karlis talk about him?”

  She had propped the pillow up against the wall, and he could see she was doing her best to remember.

  “Karlis used to go on about how horrified he was by his colleagues’ nonchalance,” she began. “Their cold-blooded reaction to any kind of suffering. Mikelis was an exception. I think he and Karlis had once been delegated to arrest a poor man with a large family, and afterwards, he’d said to Karlis that he thought it was awful. Maybe Karlis mentioned him in some other context as well, but I don’t remember.”

  “When was that?”

  “Quite recently.”

  “Try and be more precise. A year ago? More?”

  “Less. It can’t have been as long as a year ago.”

  “Mikelis must have been working with the serious crimes squad if he was working together with Karlis?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “He must have been. You must phone Mikelis and tell him you need to talk to him.”

  She stared at him in horror. “He’ll have me arrested.”

  “Don’t tell him you’re Baiba Liepa. Just say you’ve something to tell him that could be useful for his career prospects, but you must be granted anonymity.”

  “It’s not easy to fool the police in this country.”

  “You have to sound convincing. You mustn’t give up.”

  “But what should I say?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to help me to work something out. What is the biggest temptation a Latvian police officer can be confronted with?”

  “Money.”

  “Foreign currency?”

  “A lot of people in my country would sell their own mother for American dollars.”

  “You must tell him you know some people who have lots of American dollars.”

  “He’ll ask where it all comes from.”

  Wallander thought for a moment, and remembered something that had happened recently in Sweden.

  “You must phone Mikelis and tell him you know two Latvians who have robbed a bank in Stockholm and acquired a large amount of foreign currency, mainly American dollars. They raided an exchange bureau at the central station in Stockholm, and the Swedish police never managed to solve the crime. The two robbers are back here in Latvia now, and they have all the foreign currency with them. That’s what you must say.”

  “He’ll ask who I am and how I know about it.”

  “Give him the impression you’ve been the girlfriend of one of the men, but that he’s jilted you. You want revenge, but you’re afraid of them and don’t dare to give your name.”

  “I’m so bad at lying.”

  He was suddenly angry.

  “Then you’d better learn. Right now. This Mikelis is our only hope of getting into the archives. I have a plan, and it might just work. If you can’t think of any suggestions, then I have to.”

  He got up from the bed. “We’re going back to Riga now, I’ll tell you all about it in the car.”

  “Do you mean Mikelis is going to look for Karlis’s papers?”

  “No, not Mikelis,” he replied solemnly. “I’ll do that. But Mikelis has to let me into the police headquarters.”

  They had returned to Riga, and Baiba had telephoned from a post office and managed to lie successfully. Then they’d gone to the indoor market. Baiba had told him to wait in the big hangar-like hall where they sold fish. He watched her disappear into the throng, and he knew he might never see her again. She returned, however, having met Mikelis in the meat section. They had wandered from stall to stall, examining the meat and talking. She told him there were no bank robbers in fact, and no American dollars. During the drive back to Riga Wallander had told her not to hesitate but to jump in with both feet and tell him the whole story. There was no other option. It was all or nothing.

  “He’ll either arrest you,” he’d told her, “or he’ll play along with us. If you start hesitating, he might suspect it’s a plot against him, maybe something being tried on by one of his superiors who is testing his loyalty. You must be able to prove that you are Karlis’s widow if he doesn’t recognize your face. You must say and do exactly what I’ve told you.”

  A good hour later Baiba returned to where Wallander was waiting. He could see immediately that she had pulled it off. Her face radiated happiness. He was reminded again how beautiful she was.

  She reported in a low voice that Mikelis had been very scared. His whole career as a police officer was on the line. He might even be risking his life. Nevertheless, she suspected he was also feeling relief.

  “He’s one of us,” she said. “Karlis was not mistaken.”

  There were still some hours to go before Wallander could put his plan into operation, and to fill in the time they wandered through the city, fixed two alternative meeting places, and then continued to the university where she worked. In a deserted biology lecture room smelling of ether, Wallander fell asleep with his head resting on a showcase containing the skeleton of a seagull. Baiba curled up on a broad window ledge, contemplating the park outside. There was nothing to do but wait, silent and exhausted.

  Shortly before 8 p.m. they parted outside the biology theater. A caretaker was doing his rounds, checking that lights were switched off and doors locked, and Baiba talked him into switching off the light above one of the back doors for a moment.

  When the light went out, Wallander slipped out the door, ran through the grounds in the direction Baiba had indicated, and when he paused to catch his breath he was sure the pack was still gathered around the university building.

  The moment the clock in the church tower behind the police headquarters struck 9 p.m., Wallander walked in through the well-lit doors and into the section of the fortress that was accessible to the public. Baiba had described in detail what Mikelis looked like, and the only thing that surprised Wallander when he found him was how young he was. Mikelis was waiting behind a desk, and Wallander wondered how on earth he had explained away his presence there. In a loud, shrill voice he protested in English about having been mugged in the street. The bastards had not only taken his money, but they’d also stolen his holy of holies, his passport.

  For one desperate moment it struck him that he might have made a fatal error. He’d forgotten to tell Baiba to find out if Mikelis spoke English. What if he only spoke Latvian? He could hardly avoid bringing in somebody who did speak English, and then Wallander would really be in trouble.

  To his relief Mikelis did speak a little English, better than the major in fact, and when one of the other duty officers came over to the desk to see if he could take this troublesome Englishman off Mikelis’s hands, he was sent away. Mikelis ushered Wallander into an adjacent room. The other officers displayed some curious interest, but hardly of the kind that suggested that they were suspicious and about to sound the alarm.

  The interrogation room was bare and cold. Wallander sat down on a chair, and Mikelis observed him unsmilingly.

  “At 10 p.m. the night shift will take over,” said Mikelis. “By then I ought to have filled in a report form on the assault. I’ll send out a car to search for some suspects whose appearance we can invent. We have exactly one hour.”

  As Wallander had expected, Mikelis told him that t
he archives were huge. He would have no chance of going through even a tiny portion of all the shelves in the caverns built into the rock under the police headquarters. If Baiba was wrong and Karlis hadn’t in fact hidden his testimony close to the file bearing her own name, they were lost.

  Mikelis drew a map for Wallander, who would have to negotiate three locked doors on his way to the archives. Mikelis would give him the keys. On the bottom floor, the basement archive, there would be a guard posted on the final door. Mikelis would lure him away with a telephone call at precisely 10:30 p.m. One hour later, at 11:30 p.m., Mikelis would go to the basement and take the guard away with him in order to help him with some task he would invent. That was when Wallander would have to leave the archive. After that, he was on his own. If he should come up against any duty officer in the corridors who became suspicious, Wallander would have to sort things out for himself.

  Could he rely on Mikelis? Wallander asked himself that question, and decided the answer was irrelevant. He had no choice but to trust him. There was no alternative. He knew what he’d instructed Baiba to say to the young sergeant, but he had no idea what else she’d told him. He only knew it was then that Mikelis had been convinced he should help Wallander get into the archives. No matter what he did, he would have no control over what was happening around him.

  After half an hour Mikelis left the interrogation room to arrange for a patrol car to be sent out with instructions to look out for any persons answering the description of the muggers who had attacked Mr. Stevens, the English tourist. Mikelis had written out some descriptions that could well have applied to most of the citizens of Riga, and Wallander noticed that one of the descriptions could easily have been of Mikelis himself. The attack was assumed to have taken place near the Esplanade, but Mr. Stevens was still too upset to be able to go with the car and point out the exact spot. When Mikelis returned, they went over the map of the route to the archives once again. Wallander noticed he would have to pass by the corridor where the colonels had their offices, and where he himself had also had a room. The very thought made him shudder. Even if one of them is in his office, he thought, I can’t know whether he was the one who ordered Sergeant Zids to butcher Inese and her friends. Was it Putnis, or Murniers? Which of them has sent out his dogs to hunt down the people who are searching for the major’s testimony?

  When it was time for the night shift to take over, Wallander noticed that all the tension had affected his stomach. He badly needed to go to the bathroom, but knew there was no time for that. Mikelis opened the door into the corridor, then gave Wallander the order to go. He had memorized the map and knew he couldn’t afford to get lost—if he did, he would never reach the last door in time for Mikelis’s call that would distract the guard.

  The building was deserted. He hastened along the lengthy corridors as quietly as he could, afraid that any moment a door would be flung open and a gun pointed at him. He counted the staircases as he passed them, heard the sound of footsteps echoing down a distant corridor, and had the feeling of being in the middle of a labyrinth where one could get lost all too easily. He started down the stairs, wondering how far below street level the archives actually were. At last he got very close to the place where the guard would be on duty, glanced at his watch and saw that Mikelis’s phone call was due in only a couple of minutes. He stood motionless, listening. The silence unnerved him. Had he taken a wrong turn despite everything?

  The shrill sound of the telephone ringing suddenly pierced the silence, and Wallander could start breathing again. He heard footsteps in the adjacent corridor, and when they died away he moved forward, came to the archive door and opened it with the two keys Mikelis had given him.

  Wallander had been told where the light switches were, and groped his way along the wall until he came to them. Mikelis had assured him that the door fitted tightly and there would be no light seeping through the cracks to alert the guard.

  The room was like a huge underground hangar. He had never imagined the archives would be as big as this. Just for a moment he paused, overwhelmed by the endless rows of cupboards and shelves crammed with files. The Evil Room, he thought. What was the major thinking when he came in here and planted the bomb he hoped would explode sooner or later?

  He glanced at his watch and was annoyed at having allowed himself to waste time thinking such thoughts. He was also uncomfortably aware that he couldn’t wait much longer before emptying his bowels. There must be a bathroom somewhere in the archive, he thought desperately. But the question is, will I be able to find it?

  He started walking in the direction Mikelis had indicated. He had warned Wallander how easy it was to get lost among the shelves and cupboards, which all looked the same. He cursed the fact that so much of his attention was being distracted by his rumbling stomach, and he was frightened by what would happen if he didn’t find a bathroom soon.

  He stopped and looked round. It was clear that he was off course—but had he gone too far or had he turned off somewhere where he shouldn’t, according to Mikelis’s map? He retraced his steps. It struck him he was now completely disoriented, and he panicked. He looked at his watch and saw he had 42 minutes left, but he ought to have found the right section of the archive by now. He cursed to himself. Was Mikelis’s map wrong? Why couldn’t he find it? He decided he would have to start all over again and ran back between the rows of shelves to the entrance. In his haste he managed to kick over a metal wastebasket which bounced into a filing cabinet with a loud crash. The guard, he thought. This noise must have been audible from outside. He stood stock still, listening, but there was no rattling of keys in the locks. It was then that he was forced to accept he couldn’t control his bowels a moment longer. He pulled down his trousers, crouched over the wastebasket and relieved himself. Feeling furious and disgusted at the same time, he reached for a file on the nearest shelf, ripped out some sheets of paper that were presumably the record of some interrogation or other, and wiped himself. Then he began all over again, knowing that this time he really had to find the correct spot or it would be too late. He made a silent plea to Rydberg, asking him to guide him, then started counting the racks and bays, and this time was sure he had gotten it right. It had taken far too long, though, and now he had only 30 minutes in which to find the testimony. He doubted that would be long enough. He started searching. Mikelis hadn’t been able to tell him in detail how the various files were arranged, and Wallander was forced to feel his way forward. He could see immediately that the archive did not follow alphabetical order. There were sections and sub-sections, and perhaps even sub-sub-sections. These are all the disloyal citizens, he thought. Here are all the people who have been kept under observation and terrorized, all the people who have been reported or marked out as candidates for the title “enemy of the state.” There are so many of them, I’ll never be able to find Baiba’s file.

  He tried to identify the nerve center of the archive, to pinpoint the logical position for a file that had been inserted as a joker in the pack. Time went by, and still he was none the wiser. Frantically, he went back and started again, pulling out files that seemed to be different in color, trying hard all the time not to lose his cool.

  There were only ten minutes to go, and still he hadn’t found Baiba’s file. He hadn’t found anything at all, actually. He felt increasingly desperate at the thought of having come this far, but now being forced to admit defeat. There was no longer time for a systematic search. All he could do now was to make one last sweep along the shelves and hope that his instinct would lead him to the right place. But he was well aware that there wasn’t a single archive in the world that was arranged according to intuition and instinct, and he was convinced he had failed. The major had been a wise man, much too clever for Kurt Wallander of the Ystad police.

  Where, he thought. Where? What if this archive were a pack of cards? Where would the odd card be? At the side or in the middle?

  He chose the middle, ran his hand over a row of files that
all had brown covers, and suddenly noticed one that was blue. He pulled out the brown files from either side of the blue one—one was labelled Leonard Blooms, the other Baiba Kalns. Just for a moment, he couldn’t think straight—and then it dawned on him that Baiba Liepa must have been called Kalns before she got married, and he took down the blue file, which he saw had no name at all, and no code number. He had no time to examine it, his time had run out already. He raced back to the entrance, put the light out and unlocked the door. There was no sign of the guard, but according to Mikelis’s timetable he was due back any moment. Wallander hurried down the corridor, but then heard the echoing footsteps of the guard returning. He couldn’t continue in that direction, and it was clear to Wallander he would have to ignore the map and try to find his way to the exit as best he could. He stood motionless as the guard went past along a parallel corridor. When the footsteps had died away, he decided the first thing he should do was to make his way up from the basement. He found a staircase and remembered how many flights he had walked down on his way there. When he came up to ground level, he had no idea where he was. He walked along the first empty corridor he came to.

  The man who surprised him had been having a smoke. He must have heard Wallander’s footsteps approaching, put out his cigarette with his boot, and wondered who on earth was on duty so late at night. When Wallander turned the corner, the man was only a few meters away. He seemed to be in his 40s, his tunic was unbuttoned, and the moment he saw Wallander with the blue file in his hand, he must have realized immediately that this man had no business to be in the building. He drew his pistol and shouted something in Latvian. Wallander didn’t understand a word, but raised his hands over his head. The man had continued to shout as he approached, the pistol pointing at Wallander’s chest. It occurred to Wallander that the police officer wanted him to kneel down, so he did so, his hands still raised in a pathetic gesture. There was no possibility of escape, he had been captured, and before long one of the colonels would appear and take possession of the blue file containing the major’s testimony.