“The economists?” said Hultin.
“Chief economist Soderstedt reporting,” said Soderstedt. “I’ll speak for Pettersson, Floren, and myself. Chavez can make his own report. We’ve located a number of interesting things in the terrible corporate mess that the three gentlemen have left behind. The lawyers should be rubbing their hands together: there’s enough to keep them busy for years to come. But the occasional irregularities that we’ve come across are of a different nature than crimes of violence. We’ll get back to you when we know more. All we can say now is that there are more connections among the empires of the three men than we originally thought.”
Hultin was just about to make his “time’s up” sign when Soderstedt stopped talking of his own accord.
Chavez then took the floor. “There are three boards of directors that included all three victims during the late eighties and early nineties. I’m checking up on everyone who was a board member at Ericsson, Sydbanken, and MEMAB during the same period. It’s quite a list. Right now I’m leaning toward MEMAB, partly because it had and still has the smallest board of directors, a purely mathematical-statistical distinction; partly because Paul’s golf lead is connected to MEMAB, which is a more gut-level distinction; and partly because membership on that particular board seems to have aroused a bit of competition, not to mention hostility. So to put it simply, I’m looking for enemies among the board members. So far nothing concrete, but a few nibbles at MEMAB.”
Chavex delivered the last two statements at breakneck speed since he was looking at Hultin’s hands in a
“Let’s get busy, then.” Hultin removed his glasses and left the room through his special door.
On his way out, Hjelm stopped Kerstin Holm. “If you want to take Sir George, go ahead. I was out of line bringing that up. I guess I’m just obsessed with the Order of Mimir.”
“Fine,” she said curtly, then disappeared into room 303 just as Nyberg came out with his jacket in hand and gave Hjelm a wave. Like Laurel and Hardy, they trudged down the hallway and out into the sunshine.
It turned out to be a long and tiresome day. Hjelm drove Nyberg around, following a list of names in Nyberg’s notebook, which soon filled up with check marks. The names checked off consisted partly of a bunch of well- informed snitches, partly of shady characters with possible Russian contacts for access to cheap booze and drugs: pub owners who slept in the daytime, notorious pushers, steroid-popping gym owners, less-than-honest art dealers, owners of illegal gambling clubs. All of them well known to the police but impossible to catch.
Nyberg’s personality changed before Hjelm’s eyes. From one second to the next the bass singer in the Nacka Church choir switched from a good-natured teddy bear to a furious grizzly, then back again when it was time to check off another name.
“How the hell do you do that?” asked Hjelm after check number eight, just as fruitless as the previous seven.
Gunnar Nyberg chuckled. “It’s all a matter of harnessing the steroids,” he said. He stopped laughing and stared out the car window with a faraway look in his eyes. After a moment he went on quietly.
“I was Mr. Sweden in 1973. I was twenty-three and tossed down all the pills that anyone handed to me, as long as they would increase my muscle mass. While I was on the Norrmalm police force from 1975 to ’77, I was charged three times for police brutality but managed, with the proper help, to wriggle my way out of it each time. The reports just disappeared, so to speak, in the bureaucratic process. I stopped doing serious bodybuilding, meaning with drugs, in 1977 after the last charge of assault and battery, which was a really close call. Even I could see that. I’m never going to get over it. For a time I struggled with sudden outbursts of anger. I left my wife and lost custody rights to my kids. But I conquered that angry shit. At least I think I did. But I still don’t know whether I pretend to be enraged, or whether it actually takes over for a moment. I don’t know. But it seems very controlled, don’t you think?”
Hjelm would never again hear Gunnar Nyberg say so much all at one time.
“Very,” he said. Nyberg never crossed the line. His violence was indirect. With almost three hundred pounds of potential assault and battery looming over them, most small-time thugs quickly turned submissive.
They continued all day long and even into the evening, traversing Stockholm and its environs. Hjelm’s main role was to drive, but he usually slipped his brief questions regarding pimps into Nyberg’s interrogations. Just before three in the afternoon Hjelm had a brief phone conversation with Hultin, who had decided to skip the three o’clock meeting; there wasn’t anything new to discuss. Hjelm reported on the duo’s meager results:
The owner of a gym in Bandhagen had bought a large supply of anabolic steroids from a couple of “ferocious Russians” who called themselves Peter Ustinov and John Malkovich.
One of the more prominent drug pushers at Sergelplattan had once received a load of first-rate stuff, sent in plastic bags that had Russian letters printed on them. That was all they could get out of him before he started spitting up blood.
The owner of a small basement pub in Soder had made several purchases of Estonian vodka via a strange Russian pair calling themselves Igor and Igor.
A self-proclaimed art dealer in Jarfalla had been offered big money from a “Russian-speaking gangster type” for a Picasso, then in the possession of the financier Anders Wall. He had declined the offer.
An amphetamine-babbling proprietor of a video store with private viewing booths in Norrmalm had cheerfully offered them some child porn films with Russian subtitles, even though they had shown him their police ID. He was arrested. He spoke Swedish with a Russian accent, but he wasn’t Russian. With thirty confiscated child porn movies, it wasn’t going to be difficult to get him arraigned quickly. They would be talking to him again later.
That was all they had come up with just before three P.M. on April 4.
Their search continued until seven. By then every name and address on Nyberg’s list had been checked off.
The latter half of their search was depressing in terms of the Russian mafia lead, since it brought in no results whatsoever. But after an utterly absurd marathon chase all the way from Tessin Park to Vartahamn, they had caught up with a terrified dealer. They learned from him that the man who went by the name of Johan Stake had actually been baptized Johan Stake, and one of his many enterprises was a phone sex company with an 071 pay- by-the-minute number. The company was called JSHB, for Johan Stake Handelsbolag, and it was located in Bromma. They had big ads on the phone sex pages in all the tabloids.
When Hjelm and Nyberg drove back across the Liljeholm Bridge, the lights of the city were already turned on. Everything had settled into an eerie silence; they both noticed it, although it might have existed only in their own minds. They both knew that they would sleep badly.
They knew when and how, but not who or where.
That night another person was going to be murdered.
16
All during breakfast Paul Hjelm’s attention was focused on the cell phone that lay like a defective slab of cheese among the others on the kitchen table. Even though he didn’t take his eyes off it even once, he could feel the annoyed glances that Cilla directed at him, only to be dismissed over and over again. Finally her gaze grew so sharp that he was forced to look up.
“Maybe he hasn’t been found yet,” he said, his thoughts still on the cell phone.
But the look on her face wasn’t her usual give-me-some-attention-too expression. It had been transformed into something else, something he’d never seen before. A strangely lonely expression, a look of final surrender. So desolate. He was totally bewildered. A feeling rushed through him, the same one that had stunned him as he listened to Kerstin Holm’s cassette tapes: the dreadful, unbearable feeling that we can never really reach anyone else. Never ever, not even those closest to us.
The horrifying sensation of absolute existential loneliness.
And now he saw this same emotion in Cilla’s eyes.
For a brief second they were paradoxically united by this overwhelming emotion.
When they finally managed to speak, they were both fully aware that what they said had nothing to do with what they really wanted to say. For
There at the kitchen table, on that ordinary morning, they shared, while being unable to communicate it in any way, an almost mystical experience that their very language was assigning them roles that they would never be
