The Sandman

by Kepler, Lars

  Nikita Karpin knows that Joona knows the dog is dead. And he knows that Joona knows where to find him if he goes for a walk on the ice on the Klyazma River.

  129

  It’s ten to seven in the evening, and Joona Linna is sitting on the last flight to Moscow. By the time the plane lands in Russia it’s gone midnight. The country is in the grip of a crisp chill, and the low temperature makes the snow quite dry.

  Joona is being driven through the vast, monotonous suburbs in a taxi. It feels as though he’s caught in a loop of sprawling municipal housing estates when the city finally changes. He manages to catch a glimpse of one of Stalin’s seven sisters – the beautiful skyscrapers – before the taxi turns into a back street and stops outside the hotel.

  His room is very basic and dimly lit. The ceiling is high, and the walls are yellow with cigarette smoke. On the desk is an electric brown plastic samovar. The fire-escape notice on the back of the door has a circular scorch-mark over the emergency exit.

  As Joona stands at the only window looking down at the alley, he can feel the winter chill through the glass. He lies back on the rough brown bedspread, gazes up at the ceiling and can hear muffled voices laughing and talking in the next room. He thinks it’s too late to call Disa and say goodnight.

  Thoughts are swirling through his mind, and their images carry him into sleep. A girl waiting for her mother to plait her hair, Saga Bauer looking at him with her head covered in cuts, and Disa lying in his bath humming with her eyes half-closed.

  At half past five in the morning Joona’s mobile starts to vibrate on the bedside table. He slept in his clothes, with all the blankets and covers on top of him. The tip of his nose is frozen and he has to blow on his fingers before he can switch the alarm off.

  Through the window the sky is still dark.

  Joona goes down to the foyer and asks the young woman in reception to hire a car for him. He sits at one of the ornately laid tables, drinks tea and eats warm bread with melted butter and thick slices of cheese.

  An hour later he is driving a brand-new BMW X3 on the M2 motorway out of Moscow. Shiny black tarmac rushes under the car. There’s heavy traffic through Vidnoye and it’s already eight o’clock when he leaves the motorway and turns off onto winding, white roads.

  The trunks of the birch trees look like skinny young angels in the snow-covered landscape. Russia is so beautiful, it’s almost frightening.

  It’s cold and clear, and Ljubimovka is bathed in wintery sunshine when Joona turns off and pulls up in a cleared yard in front of the house. He was once told the place used to be Russian theatre legend Stanislavsky’s summer residence.

  Nikita Karpin comes out onto the veranda.

  ‘You remembered my grubby old dog,’ he smiles, shaking hands with Joona.

  Nikita Karpin is a short, stout man with an attractively aged face, a steely gaze and a military haircut. When he was an agent, he was a frightening man.

  Nikita Karpin is no longer formally a member of the security services, but he’s still employed by the Ministry of Justice. Joona knows that if anyone can find out whether Jurek Walter has any connection to Russia, it’s Karpin.

  ‘We share an interest in serial killers,’ Nikita says, showing Joona in. ‘For my part, they can be seen as empty wells that can filled with unsolved crimes … which of course is very practical. But on the other hand we have to arrest them so as not to appear incompetent, which makes the whole business much more complicated …’

  Joona follows Karpin into a large, beautiful room whose interior seems to have remained untouched since the turn of the last century.

  The old medallion wallpaper shimmers like thick cream. A framed portrait of Stanislavsky hangs above a black grand piano.

  The agent pours a drink from a misty glass jug. On the table is a grey cardboard box.

  ‘Elderflower cordial,’ he says, patting his liver.

  As Joona takes the glass and they sit down facing each other, Nikita’s face changes. His friendly smile vanishes as though it had never existed.

  ‘The last time we met … most things were still secret, but in those days I was in charge of a specially trained group that went by the name of the Little Stick, in direct translation,’ Nikita says in a low voice. ‘We were fairly heavy-handed … both my men and I …’

  He leans back in his chair, making it creak.

  ‘Maybe I’ll burn in hell for that?’ he says seriously. ‘Unless there’s an angel who protects people who defend the motherland.’

  Nikita’s veined hands are lying on the table between the grey box and the jug of cordial.

  ‘I wanted to come down harder on the Chechen terrorists,’ he goes on gravely. ‘I’m proud of our actions in Beslan, and in my opinion Anna Politkovskaya was a traitor.’

  He puts his glass down and takes a deep breath.

  ‘I’ve looked at the material that your Security Police sent to the FSB … you haven’t managed to find out very much, Joona Linna.’

  ‘No,’ Joona says patiently.

  ‘We used to call the young engineers and workmen who were sent to the cosmodrome in Leninsk rocket fuel.’

  ‘Rocket fuel?’

  ‘Everything surrounding the space programme had to be kept secret. All reports were carefully encrypted. The intention was that engineers would never come back from there. They were the best educated scientists of their day, but they were treated like cattle.’

  The KGB agent falls silent. Joona raises his glass and drinks.

  ‘My grandmother taught me how to make elderflower cordial.’

  ‘It’s very good.’

  ‘You did the right thing, coming to me, of course, Joona Linna,’ Nikita Karpin says, wiping his mouth. ‘I’ve borrowed a file from the Little Stick’s own archives.’

  130

  The old man pulls a grey file out of the equally grey cardboard box, opens it and puts a photograph on the table in front of Joona. It’s a group picture of twenty-two men standing in front of some polished stone steps.

  ‘This was taken in Leninsk in 1955,’ Karpin says in a different tone of voice.

  In the middle of the front row sits the legendary Sergei Korolev, smiling calmly on one of the benches, the chief engineer behind the first man in space and the world’s first satellite.

  ‘Look at the men at the back.’

  Joona leans forward and looks along the row of faces. Half-hidden behind a man with tousled hair stands a skinny man with a thin face and pale eyes.

  Joona jerks his head back as if he’d just smelled ammonia.

  He’s found Jurek Walter’s father.

  ‘I see him,’ Joona says.

  ‘Stalin’s administration picked out the youngest and most talented engineers,’ Nikita says calmly, tossing an old Soviet passport in front of Joona. ‘And Vadim Levanov was without doubt one of the best.’

  As he opens the passport, Joona feels his pulse quicken.

  The black-and-white photograph features a man resembling Jurek Walter, but with warmer eyes and without all the wrinkles in his face. So, Jurek Walter’s father’s name was Vadim Levanov, Joona thinks.

  His journey here hasn’t been in vain. Now they can start to investigate Jurek Walter’s past properly.

  Nikita lays out a set of ten fingerprints, some small private photographs of Jurek’s father’s christening and schooldays, junior schoolbooks and a child’s drawing of a car with a chimney on its roof.

  ‘What do you want to know about him?’ Karpin smiles. ‘We’ve got most things … every address he ever lived at, names of girlfriends before his marriage to Elena Mishailova, letter home to his parents in Novosibirsk, the time when he was active in the party …’

  ‘His son,’ Joona whispers.

  ‘His wife was also an engineer, but she died in childbirth when they’d been married two years,’ Karpin goes on.

  ‘The son,’ Joona repeats.

  Karpin stands up, opens the wooden cupboard, gets out a heavy case and puts it
on the table. When he lifts the lid, Joona sees that it’s a film-projector for 16-millimetre film.

  Nikita Karpin asks Joona to close the curtains, then takes a reel of film from his grey box.

  ‘This is a private film from Leninsk that I think you should see …’

  The projector starts to click, and the image is projected directly onto the medallion wallpaper. Karpin adjusts the focus, then sits down again.

  The saturation of the image varies, but otherwise it’s fine. The camera must have been on a stand.

  Joona realises that he’s looking at a film taken by Jurek Walter’s father during his time in Leninsk.

  The image on the wall in front of him shows the back of a house and a verdant garden. Sunlight filters through the leaves and above the trees in the background he can make out an electricity pylon.

  The image shakes a little, then Jurek’s father comes into view. He puts a heavy case down in the long grass, opens it and gets out four camping chairs. A boy with neatly combed hair enters the frame from the left. He looks about seven years old and has chiselled features and big, pale eyes.

  There’s no doubt that it’s Jurek, Joona thinks, hardly daring to breathe.

  The boy says something, but all that can be heard is the clicking of the projector.

  Father and son help each other unfold the metal legs of the case, which transforms into a wooden-topped table when they turn it over.

  Young Jurek disappears from view, but returns with a jug of water from the opposite direction. It happens so quickly that Joona thinks there must have been some trick.

  Jurek bites his lips and clasps his hands tight as his father speaks to him.

  He disappears from view again, and his father strides after him.

  The water in the jug sparkles in the sunlight.

  A short while later Jurek returns with a white paper bag, and then his father comes back with another child on his shoulders.

  The father is shaking his head and trotting like a horse.

  Joona can’t see the other child’s face.

  The child’s head is out of frame, but Jurek waves up at it.

  Feet with small shoes on kick at the father’s chest.

  Jurek calls out something.

  And when his father puts the second child down on the grass in front of the table Joona sees that it too is Jurek.

  The identical boy stares into the camera with a serious face. A shadow sweeps across the garden. The father takes the paper bag and disappears out of the picture.

  ‘Identical twins,’ the agent smiles, stopping the projector.

  ‘Twins,’ Joona repeats.

  ‘That was why their mother died.’

  131

  Joona is staring straight at the medallion wallpaper, and repeating silently to himself that the Sandman is Jurek Walter’s twin brother.

  That’s who’s holding Felicia captive.

  That was who Lumi saw in the garden when she was going to wave at the cat.

  And that was why Susanne Hjälm was able to see Jurek Walter in the darkness of the car park outside the hospital.

  The warm projector is making small clicking sounds.

  Taking his glass with him, Joona gets to his feet and goes over to open the curtains, then stands at the window gazing out at the ice-covered surface of the Klyazma River.

  ‘How were you able to find all this?’ he asks when he’s confident his voice won’t crack. ‘How many files and films did you have to go through? I mean, you must have material covering millions of people.’

  ‘Yes, but we only had one defector from Leninsk to Sweden,’ Karpin replies calmly.

  ‘Their father fled to Sweden?’

  ‘August 1957 was a difficult month in Leninsk,’ Nikita replies cryptically, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We made two attempts to launch Semyorka. The first time the auxiliary rocket caught fire and the missile crashed four hundred kilometres away. The second time – the same fiasco. I was sent down there to remove the people responsible. Give them a taste of the little stick. Don’t forget that no less than five per cent of the entire GDP of the Soviet Union went to the installation at Leninsk. The third launch attempt succeeded and the engineers could breathe out, until the Nedelin disaster three years later.’

  ‘I’ve read about that,’ Joona says.

  ‘Mitrofan Nedelin rushed the development of an intercontinental rocket,’ Nikita says, looking at the glowing tip of his cigarette. ‘It exploded in the middle of the cosmodrome, and more than a hundred people were burned to death. Vadim Levanov and the twins were unaccounted for. For months we thought they’d been killed along with everyone else.’

  ‘But they hadn’t,’ Joona says.

  ‘No,’ Nikita says. ‘He fled because he was afraid of reprisals, and he would certainly have ended up in the gulag, probably the Siblag work camp … but instead he turned up in Sweden.’

  Nikita Karpin falls silent and slowly stubs his cigarette out on a small porcelain saucer.

  ‘We kept Vadim Levanov and the twins under constant surveillance, and obviously we were prepared to liquidate him,’ Karpin goes on quietly. ‘But we didn’t need to … because Sweden treated him like garbage, and arranged a special gulag for him … The only work he could get was as a manual labourer in a gravel quarry.’

  Nikita Karpin’s eyes flash cruelly.

  ‘If you’d shown any interest in what he knew, Sweden could have been first into space,’ he laughs.

  ‘Maybe,’ Joona replies calmly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So Jurek and his brother arrived in Sweden at the age of ten or so?’

  ‘But they only stayed a couple of years,’ Nikita smiles.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You don’t become a serial killer for no reason.’

  ‘Do you know what happened?’ Joona asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  Nikita Karpin gazes out of the window and wets his lips. The low winter light is shining in through the uneven glass.

  132

  Today Saga is first into the dayroom, and immediately gets onto the running machine. She manages to run for four minutes, and has just lowered the speed and started to walk when Bernie comes in from his room.

  ‘I’m going to start driving a taxi when I’m free … Bloody hell, like some fucking Fittipaldi … and you can ride for free, and I’ll get to touch you between—’

  ‘Just shut up,’ she cuts him off.

  He nods, looking wounded, then walks straight over to the palm leaf, turns it over and points at the microphone with a thin grin.

  ‘Now you’re my slave,’ he laughs.

  Saga jabs him hard, making him stumble back and sit down on the floor.

  ‘I want to escape as well,’ he hisses. ‘I want to drive a taxi and—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Saga says, checking over her shoulder to see if the guards are on their way in through the airlock.

  But no one seems to be watching them on the monitor in the security control room.

  ‘You’re going to take me with you when you escape, do you hear—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Jurek interrupts behind them.

  ‘Sorry,’ Bernie whispers quietly at the floor.

  Saga didn’t hear Jurek come into the dayroom. A shiver runs down her spine when she realises that he may have seen the microphone under the palm leaf.

  Maybe her cover is already blown?

  Maybe it’s going to happen now, she thinks. The crisis she’s been dreading is happening now. She feels adrenalin rushing through her, and tries to visualise the plan of the secure unit. In her thoughts she moves quickly through the marked doors, the different zones, the best places to take temporary shelter.

  If Bernie blows her cover, she’ll have to barricade herself in her room to start with. Ideally she needs to get hold of the microphone and shout for immediate backup, get them to come and rescue her.

  Jurek stops in front of Bernie, who’s lying on the
floor whispering his apologies.

  ‘You’re to pull the lead off the running machine, then go to your room and hang yourself from the top of your door,’ Jurek tells him.

  Bernie looks up at Jurek with fear in his eyes.

  ‘What? What the fuck …?’

  ‘Tie the lead to the handle on the outside, throw it over the door and pull your plastic chair over,’ Jurek explains curtly.

  ‘I don’t want to, I don’t want to,’ Bernie says, his lips trembling.

  ‘We can’t have you alive any longer,’ Jurek says calmly.

  ‘But … what the fuck, I was only joking, I know very well that I can’t come with you … I know it’s just your thing … just your thing …’

  133

  Nathan Pollock and Corinne Meilleroux both stand up from the table when the situation in the dayroom becomes more acute.

  They realise that Jurek has decided to execute Bernie, and are hoping that Saga won’t forget that she has no police responsibilities or rights.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Corinne whispers.

  Slow, thunderous rumbling sounds emerge from the speakers. Johan Jönson adjusts the sound levels and scratches his head anxiously.

  ‘Give me a punishment instead,’ Bernie whimpers. ‘I deserve a punishment …’

  ‘I can break both his legs,’ Saga says.

  Corinne wraps her arms round herself and is trying to control her breathing.

  ‘Don’t do anything,’ Pollock whispers to the speaker. ‘You have to trust the guards, you’re only a patient.’

  ‘Why hasn’t anyone come in?’ Johan Jönson says. ‘The guards must have noticed what’s going on, for God’s sake?’

  ‘If she acts, Jurek will kill her at once,’ Corinne whispers, the stress making her French accent come to the fore.

  ‘Don’t do anything,’ Pollock pleads. ‘Don’t do anything!’