Misterioso

“Igor and Igor!” he screamed. “That’s all I know! They do their own pickups!”

“Igor and Igor are your Russian mafia contacts? Is that right?”

“Yes, yes, yes! Damn it, that’s all I know!”

“I know all about you,” said Norlander. “You speak Russian. You know what these guys Igor and Igor said to each other. I need more!”

Norlander lowered his gun and aimed the barrel at the man’s hand lying on the desk.

“A little more, please,” he said, and fired.

The bullet passed between the man’s middle finger and ring finger, singeing the skin. Stromstedt screamed even louder.

“Gotlanders!” he wailed.

“Go on,” said Norlander, moving the gun until it was pointing at the man’s wrist.

“The Gotland blackhead smugglers! They belong to the same gang! That’s all I know, I swear! They talked about Gotland and how clumsy the guys had been down there!”

Viggo Norlander lifted Stromstedt up by his ponytail, yanked on the door handle behind his back, and hurled the man into the nearest closet. Then he barricaded the door and left him there. He could hear a flood of curses coming from inside.

He thought they were Finland-Swedish.

A barrier, thought Norlander as he sped away from Frihamnen. He received the go- ahead from Hultin on his cell to drive straight out to Arlanda Airport.

A barrier had been lifted.

Now he was really going to be fucking dangerous.

Viggo Norlander was forty-eight years old, divorced, with no children. End of story. The bare spot on the top of his head had long ago acquired its final shape; not so his stomach, which slowly continued to grow. He wasn’t fat, just pre-fat.

There wasn’t a single blot on his record. Nor much of anything else. He’d always been an exemplary if not always terribly active officer, whose only guides through the journey of life had been the police handbook and the book of law. He’d always believed in legal methods, in defending established society, and in the slowly grinding wheels of the justice system.

His life had stagnated and, like his bald spot, had long ago achieved its final form. It was a deliberate stagnation. The humdrum was his very essence, the correct, the legal, what could be described in black and white. He’d always believed that people were generally like himself: hardworking, never making up excuses to take sick days, paying their taxes without complaint, and following the universal rules, with no extremes, either highs or lows.

Everything else was shit and had to be removed.

And in his world all law-abiding citizens intuitively wanted the shit removed, and naturally they appreciated his efforts to get it off the streets.

No matter what he happened to encounter in the course of his daily work in the Stockholm criminal division, he still managed to retain these crystal-clear guidelines in his job and in his life. He’d always been quite satisfied both with himself and with the police force in general. In spite of occasional slumps and upticks, everything was moving in the right direction and at the right speed, which meant at a steady pace: growth, progress, development. A stable societal advancement.

He was a tranquil man.

He would never be able to put his finger on where the rupture first appeared, or where the wall had finally burst.

Not even if subjected to torture would he admit to the presence of a rupture, simply because it didn’t exist in his worldview.

But it did exist in his present world of action.

Now as he walked through Visby, on the island of Gotland, moving along the medieval ring wall in the morning mist, his beliefs were still intact. Conditioned by trust. The lingering vestiges of the previous days. What he had done and was about to do were necessary. No more unsolved Palme murders. Legal security, he thought. Trust. Societal responsibility. Daggfeldt, Strand-Julen, Carlberger. That was enough. He would see to that.

He was defending the most important thing of all.

Even though he didn’t really know what it was.

After a long walk through an almost-deserted Visby, encircled by a sort of Mediterranean morning mist as much as by the ring wall, he reached the police station. It was seven-thirty A.M.

He went inside and was directed to the jail. There he found an officer on duty who was about his own age. They immediately recognized the policeman in each other. That was how he looked-Policeman with a capital P. And Swedish.

“Norlander,” said Norlander.

“Jonsson,” said Jonsson, speaking with a distinct accent stemming from both Skane and Gotland. “Vilhelm Jonsson. We’ve been expecting you. Peshkov is ready whenever you are.”

“I assume that you’re aware of the gravity of this investigation. There is nothing more important in Sweden today.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“So how do we do this? Does he speak English?”

“Fortunately, he does. An old, international seaman. I assume that it would have been inconvenient to have an interpreter present. If I understood you correctly.”

“We certainly do understand each other. Where is he?”

“In a soundproof room, as agreed. Shall we?”

Norlander nodded, and Vilhelm Jonsson led the way along several corridors, recruiting a couple of guards from the break room as they walked past. Then they all went down to the basement. The four men stopped outside a gray-painted steel door with a peephole.

Jonsson cleared his throat. “As you’ve explained,” he said, “because this investigation is classified, and for other reasons as well, we won’t be allowed to participate in the interrogation, but we’ll stand guard outside. Here’s the panic button. Press it and we’ll be inside in a second.”

Norlander accepted the little box with the red button. He put it in his pocket. “Don’t look unless you have to,” he said calmly. “The less you know, the better. That way any eventual complaints will be directed to NCP management. It’s for the best.”

They unlocked the door and let him in. A table, two chairs, padded walls. Nothing more. Except for a small man wearing prison garb sitting on one of the chairs. A sharp face, skinny biceps. The sinewy, ropy muscles of a sailor, thought Norlander, assessing the man’s potential strength to resist-it wouldn’t be in his body, at any rate. The man stood up and greeted Norlander politely, “How do you do, sir?”

“Very brilliant, please,” said Norlander, placing a notebook and pen on the table before sitting down. “Sit down, thank you.”

The conversation proceeded, although not without certain linguistic infelicities. In the same knotty English, Norlander continued, “Let’s get right to the point, Mr. Alexey Peshkov. During a bad winter storm you and your crew ditched a hundred and twelve Iranian, Kurdish, and Indian refugees in two rubber rafts hundreds of yards off the east coast of Gotland, then headed back to Tallinn in your fishing boat. But the Swedish coast guard managed to stop your vessel before it left Swedish waters.”

“Very straight to the point,” said Peshkov.

Since irony wasn’t Norlander’s strong suit, his attempt to imitate Hultin’s icy tone came out a bit abruptly. “I need information,” he went on, “about the serial killings of Swedish businessmen that have occurred in Stockholm over the past few days.”

Alexey Peshkov’s jaw dropped. After he managed to close it again, he blurted out, “You must be joking!”

“I am not joking,” said Norlander and continued in the same calm manner. “If you don’t give me the information I want, I have the authority to kill you right here and now. I’m specially trained for that. Do you understand?”

“I’m not buying this,” said Peshkov, eyeing Norlander’s slightly flabby build. At the same time, Norlander’s utterly composed steadiness of purpose brought a dubious expression to the man’s face. Norlander hammered