The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery

by Henning Mankell

  That is what would happen, that is what would pass for the truth. If anybody should ever ask, which was unlikely. Wallander would never know why Murniers allowed it to happen. Was it for the major’s sake? For the country’s? Or did he just think Wallander deserved an appropriate farewell present?

  That was the end of the conversation. There was nothing more to say.

  “The passport you are currently holding is of very doubtful validity,” Murniers said, “but I’ll make sure you get back home to Sweden without any problems. When are you thinking of going?”

  “Maybe not tomorrow,” Wallander said, “but the day after, perhaps.”

  Colonel Murniers accompanied him down to the car that was waiting in the yard. Wallander suddenly remembered his Peugeot that was parked in a barn somewhere in Germany, not far from the Polish border.

  “I wonder how on earth I’m going to get my car back home,” he said.

  Murniers stared at him in bewilderment. Wallander realized he would never discover how close Murniers was to the people who considered themselves to be a guarantee for a better future in Latvia. He had only scraped the surface of what he had been allowed to come into contact with. That was a stone he would never overturn. Murniers simply had no idea how Wallander had got into Latvia.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Wallander said.

  That damned Lippman, he thought angrily. I wonder if the Latvian organizations in exile have funds with which to compensate Swedish police officers for lost cars.

  He felt hard used, without being fully able to explain why. Perhaps he was still hampered by his overwhelming exhaustion. His judgment would continue to be unreliable until he’d had an opportunity to rest properly.

  They bade each other farewell when they got to the car waiting to take Wallander to Baiba Liepa.

  “I’ll go to the airport with you,” Murniers said. “You’ll receive two tickets, one for the flight to Helsinki, and one for Helsinki to Stockholm. As there are no passport controls within the Nordic countries, no one will ever know you have been in Riga.”

  The car drove out of the courtyard. A glass panel separated the backseat from the driver. Wallander sat in the dark, thinking about what Murniers had said. Nobody would ever know he had been in Riga. It dawned on him that he would never be able to talk to anybody about it, not even to his father. One very good reason for it remaining a secret was that it had all been so improbable, so incredible. Who would ever believe him?

  He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. The important thing now was his meeting with Baiba Liepa. What would happen when he got back to Sweden was something he could think about when it happened.

  He spent two nights and a day in Baiba Liepa’s apartment. All the time he was waiting for what, not being able to think of anything better, he called “the right moment,” but it never occurred. He didn’t utter a word about the conflicting feelings he had for her. The closest he came to her was when they sat next to each other on the sofa the second evening, looking at photographs. When he got out of the car that had taken him from Murniers to her house, her greeting had been muted, as if he had become a stranger to her again. He was put out, without even being sure what it was he was put out about. What had he expected, after all? She cooked a meal for him, a casserole with some tough chicken as the main ingredient, and he got the impression that Baiba wasn’t exactly an inspired cook. I mustn’t forget that she’s an intellectual, he thought. She’s the kind of person who is probably better qualified to dream about a better society than to cook a meal. Both types are needed, even if presumably they can’t always live happily alongside each other.

  Wallander was weighed down by feelings of melancholy that, luckily, he had no trouble keeping to himself. He no doubt belonged to the good cooks of this world. He wasn’t one of the dreamers. A police officer could hardly be preoccupied with dreams; he had to stick his nose in the dirt rather than point it heavenwards. But he knew that he had begun to fall in love with her, and that was the real cause of his melancholy. He would be forced to retain this sadness in his heart as he concluded the strangest and most dangerous mission he had ever undertaken. It hurt him deeply. When she told him his car would be waiting for him in Stockholm when he got back there, he barely reacted. He had started feeling sorry for himself.

  She made a bed up for him on the sofa. He could hear her calm breathing from the bedroom. He couldn’t sleep, despite his exhaustion. He kept getting up, walking across the cold floor-boards and looking down onto the deserted street where the major had been murdered. The shadows were no longer there, they had been buried alongside Putnis. All that was left was the gaping void, repulsive and painful.

  The day before he left they went to visit the unmarked grave where Colonel Putnis had buried Inese and her friends. They wept openly. Wallander sobbed like an abandoned child, and he felt as if he had seen for the first time what an awful world he lived in. Baiba had taken some flowers, some frail-looking roses, frozen stiff, and she laid them on the heap of soil.

  Wallander had given her the copy of the major’s testimony, but she didn’t read it while he was still there.

  The morning he flew home it was snowing in Riga.

  Murniers came to fetch him himself. Baiba embraced Wallander in the doorway, they clung to each other as if they had just survived a shipwreck, and then he left.

  Wallander walked up the steps to the airplane.

  “Have a good journey,” Murniers shouted after him.

  He’s also glad to see the last of me, Wallander thought. He’s not going to miss me.

  The plane made a wide turn to the left over Riga, then the pilot headed over the Gulf of Finland. Wallander was asleep before they even reached cruising level, his head resting on his chest.

  That same evening he landed in Stockholm. A voice on the public address system asked him to report to the information desk. He was handed an envelope containing his passport and car keys. The car was parked next to the taxi stand, and to his surprise Wallander noted that it had been cleaned. It was warm inside. Somebody had been sitting there, waiting for him. He drove home to Ystad that same night and was back in his apartment in Mariagatan just before dawn.

  EPILOGUE

  Early one morning at the beginning of May, Wallander was in his office, carefully but unenthusiastically filling in his soccer pool, when Martinsson knocked on the door and came in. It was still chilly—spring hadn’t yet reached Skåne—but even so Wallander had his window open, as if he needed to give his brain a thorough airing. He had been absentmindedly weighing the chances of the various teams beating each other while listening to a chaffinch singing away in a tree. When Martinsson appeared in the doorway, Wallander put the form away, got up from his chair and closed the window. He knew Martinsson was always worrying about catching a cold.

  “Am I disturbing you?” Martinsson asked.

  Since his return from Riga Wallander had been offhand and brusque with his colleagues. Some of them had wondered, strictly between themselves, how he could have grown so out of sorts just because he’d broken his hand skiing in the Alps. Nobody wanted to ask him about it straight out, however, and they all thought his bad mood would gradually die away of its own accord.

  Wallander was aware that he was behaving badly towards his colleagues. He had no business making their work more difficult, but he didn’t know how he should go about becoming the Wallander of old again, the firm but good-humored officer of the Ystad police. It was as if that person no longer existed. Nor did he know whether he really missed him. There was very little he did know about himself. The supposed trip to the Alps had exposed how little genuine truth there was in his life. He knew that he was not the kind of man who consciously surrounded himself with lies, but he had begun to ask himself whether his ignorance of what the world really looked like was in itself a sort of lie, even though it was founded in naïvete rather than a conscious effort to cut himself off.

  Every time someone came into his office, he felt a
twinge of guilt, but he could think of nothing better to do than to pretend that there was nothing wrong.

  “No, you’re not disturbing me,” he said, trying hard to sound friendly. “Sit down.”

  Martinsson sat down in the visitor’s chair that sagged and was most uncomfortable. “I thought I’d tell you a strange story,” he said. “Or rather, I’ve two stories to tell you. It looks as if we’ve been visited by ghosts from the past.”

  Wallander didn’t like Martinsson’s way of expressing things. The grim reality they had to deal with as police officers always seemed to him unsuitable for dressing up in poetic terms. But he said nothing and waited.

  “Do you remember that man who phoned to tell us that a life raft was going to be washed up near here,” Martinsson continued, “the guy we never caught up with, and who never identified himself?”

  “There were two men,” Wallander interrupted.

  Martinsson nodded. “Let’s start with the first one,” he said. “A few weeks ago Anette Brolin was wondering whether to charge a man accused of a particularly nasty assault and battery, but since he had a clean record, she let him go.”

  Wallander’s ears had pricked up.

  “His name’s Holmgren,” said Martinsson. “I just happened to see the papers about that assault and battery case lying on Svedberg’s desk. I noticed he was down as the owner of a fishing boat called Byron, and bells started ringing in my head. It became even more interesting when I saw that this Holmgren had beaten up one of his closest friends, a fellow called Jakobson, who used to work as a crewman on the boat.”

  Wallander recalled that night in Brantevik harbor. Martinsson was right. They had been visited by ghosts from the past. He realized how keen he was to hear what was coming next.

  “The funny thing was that Jakobson hadn’t reported the incident, even though it was very brutal and seemed to have been unprovoked,” Martinsson said.

  “Who did report it, then?”

  “Holmgren attacked Jakobson with a crank handle out at Brantevik harbor, and someone saw him and phoned the police. Jakobson was in the hospital for three weeks. He was pretty badly beaten, but he didn’t want to report Holmgren. Svedberg never did manage to find out what was behind the violence, but I started to wonder if it might have something to do with that life raft. Remember how neither of them wanted the other one to know that they’d both contacted us? Or at least, that’s what we thought.”

  “I remember,” Wallander said.

  “I thought I’d have a word with Mr. Holmgren,” Martinsson continued. “He used to live in the same street as you, by the way, Mariagatan.”

  “Used to live?”

  “Exactly. When I went to see him, he’d moved. A long way away, as well. He’d gone off to Portugal. He’d sent in various documents that classified him as an immigrant, and given his new address as somewhere in the Azores. He’d sold Byron to some Danish fisherman or other for a real bargain basement price.”

  Martinsson paused, and Wallander watched him thoughtfully.

  “You have to agree that it’s a pretty strange story,” Martinsson said. “Do you think we ought to pass this information on to the police in Riga?”

  “No,” Wallander said. “I don’t think that’s necessary. But thanks for telling me.”

  “I haven’t finished yet,” Martinsson said. “Here comes part two of the story. Did you read the papers yesterday?”

  Wallander had stopped buying newspapers ages ago, unless he was involved in a case the press was displaying more than routine interest in. He shook his head, and Martinsson continued.

  “You should have. There were reports on how the customs in Göteborg fished up a life raft that later proved to have come from a Russian trawler. They’d found it drifting off Vinga, which seemed odd because there was no wind at all that day. The skipper of the trawler maintained they’d had to dock for some repairs to a damaged propeller. They’d been fishing at Dogger Bank, and he claimed they’d lost the life raft without noticing. By pure coincidence a sniffer dog happened to pass the life raft, and it got very interested. They found a few kilos of top-grade amphetamine hidden inside the life raft, and traced it to some laboratories in Poland. That could well give us the explanation we were looking for—the raft that was stolen from our basement probably had something hidden in it that we ought to have found.”

  It seemed to Wallander that this was a reference to his fatal mistake. Martinsson was right, of course. It had been inexcusable carelessness. All the same, he felt tempted to confide in Martinsson, to tell somebody what had really happened instead of that holiday in the Alps that had only been an excuse. But he said nothing. He didn’t think he had the strength.

  “I expect you’re right,” he said. “But I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out why those men were murdered.”

  “Don’t say that,” Martinsson said, getting to his feet. “You never know what tomorrow might have in store to astonish us. In spite of everything, it looks as though we might have gotten a little bit closer to winding up that particular story, don’t you think?”

  Wallander nodded. But he didn’t say anything.

  Martinsson paused in the doorway and turned round.

  “Do you know what I think?” he asked. “It’s only my own opinion, of course, but I figure Holmgren and Jakobson were involved in some kind of smuggling, and they just happened to see that life raft. They had a pretty good reason for not getting too closely involved with the police, though.”

  “That doesn’t explain the assault and battery,” Wallander said.

  “Maybe they’d agreed not to contact us? Maybe Holmgren thought Jakobson had been telling tales out of school?”

  “You could be right. But we’ll never know.”

  Martinsson left. Wallander opened the window again, then went back to his soccer pool. He thought of the letter he had found on his return from Riga, thanking him for his application and inviting him to an interview at the Trelleborg Rubber Company. He had told them he was not able to consider the job for the time being, but he kept the letter in his drawer.

  Later that day he drove out to a new café close to the harbor. He ordered a cup of coffee and started to write a letter to Baiba Liepa. Half an hour later he read through what he’d written and tore it up. He left the café and went out onto the pier. He scattered the pieces of paper over the water like breadcrumbs. He still didn’t know what to write to her. But his longing was very strong.

  AFTERWORD

  The revolutionary events that took place in the Baltic countries during the last year were the basis of this novel. Writing a book with a setting and plot located in an environment unfamiliar to the author is, of course, a complicated business. It is even more problematic when one tries to steer a course through a social and political landscape that is still fluid. Apart from straightforward practical difficulties—Is a particular statue still standing on its pedestal on a given day, or has it already been pulled down and taken away? Does a particular street still have the same name as it did on a certain day in February 1991?—there are other more fundamental problems. Not least among them is the fact that we now have at least a provisional answer to the direction developments in the Baltic countries will take, but that knowledge had to be put aside in writing this book.

  Reconstructing thoughts and emotions is, of course, the job of an author, but some assistance may well be necessary. In connection with this novel, I am greatly indebted to many people: I would like to thank two in particular, one by name and the other anonymously. Guntis Bergklavs put himself completely at my disposal to explain, remember, and make suggestions. He also taught me a lot about the secrets of Riga. I would also like to express my gratitude to the detective in the Riga “homicide squad” who so patiently taught me how he and his colleagues went about their business.

  We should bear in mind all the time what it was like then. Everything was so very different, even more vague than it is now. The fate of the Baltic countries is not yet decided
, not by any means. There are still large numbers of Russian troops on Latvian territory. The future will be an intense struggle between the old and the new, between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

  Just a few months after this book was finished, in the spring of 1991, the coup took place in the Soviet Union—the key incident that accelerated declarations of independence in the Baltic countries. Obviously, that coup (or the possibility that such a coup could happen) was at the very core of this novel, but like everybody else, I couldn’t possibly foresee that it really would happen, or how it would turn out.

  This is a novel. That means it is possible that not everything actually happened or looks exactly the same as I have described it in the book. But it could have happened, exactly as described. Poetic license gives the author the freedom to create a coat check in a department store where there is no such thing in fact. Or to invent a furniture department out of thin air. If necessary. And it sometimes is.

  HENNING MANKELL, APRIL 1992

  © 1992 by Henning Mankell English translation © 2001 by Laurie Thompson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form,

  without written permission from the publisher.

  Originally published as Hundarna i Riga by

  Ordfront Förlag, Stockholm, 1992

  English translation first published in Great Britain by

  The Harvill Press, London, 2001

  Published in the United States by

  The New Press, New York, 2003

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York

  eISBN : 978-1-595-58565-3

  CIP data available

  The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit