herring; and (7) all three were the intended victims.
Number 6 applied to the newly acquired GrimeBear lead. The media company known abroad as GrimeBear Publishing, Inc., turned out to be none other than the huge, powerful, and venerable Lovisedal AB, which evidently was now experiencing mafia problems in the former Soviet Union. Daggfeldt and Carlberger had both been members of the Lovisedal board of directors during the same period, from 1991 until 1993. Strand-Julen was not, and hence he could be the red herring. It was conceivable, for instance, that Daggfeldt and Carlberger were killed because Viktor X wanted to make an example of the Lovisedal corporation, due to their antipathy to the protection racket in Russia and the Baltics.
The enormous Lovisedal media factory had expanded beyond Sweden, had started a daily Russian-language business newspaper, and was exploring the Baltics, as so many other Swedish companies were doing. The free market intersected with an even freer market, was subjected to daily threats and disruptions, and then to fight the mafia turned to private Russian security services consisting of people who had been trained during the Soviet era. The Swedish companies were financing a minor civil war between ex-Soviet entrepreneurs. Foreign aid, it might be called.
Chavez followed up on the Lovisedal lead along with the MEMAB lead. This meant that he talked to all the board members from the relevant time periods, then tried to narrow his focus to potential suspects. His efforts didn’t produce much. Hjelm often accompanied him when he had to drive somewhere.
Hjelm had ended up in a real vacuum. His days seemed to center mostly on the red blemish on his left cheek. It was growing, slowly but surely. Cilla, who was a nurse, dismissed it with an ambivalent laugh. It was now about three-eighths of an inch across, and he was seriously beginning to consider the fateful word:
Kerstin Holm had hardly spoken to Hjelm since their strange conversation in the staff cafeteria. She spent most of her time with her tapes, coordinating them with the interviews of neighbors and employees that she’d assigned to the less-than-pleased Stockholm Criminal Police.
George Hummelstrand, the foremost opponent of the secession from the Order of Mimir, seemed-contrary to Judge Franzen’s observations-to have quite a skeptical attitude toward the Order of Skidbladnir. In fact, he thought the whole thing was ridiculous. His manner of speaking was much like that of his wife Anna-Clara, sprinkling semi- lewd Gallicisms into the conversation and constantly hinting at remarkable erotic relationships with other women. He kept on emphasizing what a “Free and French” relationship he and Anna-Clara enjoyed. At first Holm thought he was trying to seduce her, but she was soon convinced that he must be impotent. It was with relief but also with some fascination that she crossed Mr. and Mrs. Hummelstrand off her agenda.
Soderstedt, Pettersson, and Floren had become more and more immersed in their own world of audit reports and stockbrokers, shell companies, pseudo-businesses, covert dividends, and new stock issues. Even when Soderstedt sat down in the cafeteria and talked about convertible promissory notes so that it sounded like a public lecture, he revealed a weariness that was easy to see. Sometimes the finance group would appear at the meetings with diagrams and charts that got progressively less comprehensible and made Hultin’s increasingly messy scribbles on the whiteboard look like a miracle of precision. Soderstedt felt more and more alienated from the obvious enthusiasm exhibited by the two finance officers as they mapped the business affairs of the three wise men, Daggfeldt, Strand-Julen, and Carlberger. He wanted to be a cop again. Or at least be able to think.
Nyberg was burrowing his way like a mole through the underworld. In spite of his carefully devised methodology, he was unable to come up with any results at all. He was the first to have real doubts about the investigation. Either they were doing something fundamentally wrong, or else they were dealing with another Palme murder. Nobody in the murky world of small-time criminals, which was always filled with rumors and gossip, knew the slightest thing, either about the perpetrator or the crimes that had been committed. Both seemed to be far removed from the underworld, in the classic sense of the word. On the other hand, the underworld, in the classic sense of the word, was becoming passe. The truly violent crimes were being committed by other groups, primarily within the institution of the family, which was at the true core of crime in society; the family was the eternal recipient of all the frustrations of adult life. Burglaries were committed almost exclusively by drug addicts, while robberies were carried out by strange paramilitary organizations, often with a racist bent, in order to finance their own operations. Fraud was now an entire division within the service sector, just like any other division. The old small-time crooks stood on the sidelines, looking on and feeling positively honorable. Desperation and frustration were flourishing like never before in a society in which hordes of young people had been shut out of the job market without ever getting even a whiff of it. Nyberg wanted a vacation.
What Hultin was doing or thinking was just as mysterious as the door through which he entered and exited Supreme Central Command, the door that was always locked if anyone tried to follow him out. When they asked him about it, he merely laughed.
One evening Chavez and Hjelm slipped out to Stadshagen Field with its artificial turf to catch a glimpse of a match between senior players of the Stockholm police soccer team and the Ragsved Alliance team.
When Hultin head-butted Chavez’s father and split open his eyebrow, they left.
Hjelm, who had thrown himself into the 24/7 job to avert the personal crisis he had felt approaching, suddenly had a great deal of free time on his hands. He gazed at his lonely image in the mirror, hating the ever-growing blemish on his cheek.
By the end of April he was showering a surprising amount of attention on his family. Danne thought it was disgusting, Tova was mostly startled, and as for Cilla-he had no idea what she thought. The strange experience in the kitchen still hovered between them like an untouchable wound. Was it starting to ooze? Was it becoming inflamed?
In early May the family moved out, at least part time, to the little cabin that they’d been lucky enough to rent on Dalaro, the island that wasn’t really an island at all but rather a whole string of islands. Cilla spent almost every night out there, commuting to Huddinge Hospital. Her much-anticipated vacation would begin in June-she would have the whole summer free. The children were also out there on weekends. Danne had evidently decided to hide away from reality during this last summer of his childhood. Paul managed to get a free weekend at the very beginning of May and spent a couple of unusually pleasant days in the spring sunshine, basking in the bosom of his family, and in Cilla’s embrace. The latter took place on a blanket on a deserted pier in the midst of a fiery red sunset, with an empty wine bottle rolling around next to them. She was silent and sad afterward. Unapproachable. The preposterous beauty of the sunset seemed to have bored its way into her. A deep red layer had spilled across the motionless surface of the sea. The red contours, clearly delineated against the surrounding black, had slowly contracted; an evaporating pool of blood above an abyss. Before long only the abyss remained. Cilla began trembling, a deep, unfathomable shivering. He watched her for a long time through the gathering dusk. He tried to share her experience, tried to see what she saw, feel what she felt. But he couldn’t. The red was gone. Only black remained. He tried to get her to go up to the cabin, but he got no response. He was forced to leave her there on the pier, all alone with an experience of utter solitude. He went inside and climbed into bed but didn’t sleep all night.
Early in the morning he went back down to the pier. She was still sitting there, wrapped in the blanket. He returned to the cabin without making his presence known.
Before the move out to Dalaro nothing much happened, from a professional standpoint. It was the period of working on details and consolidating findings. Besides collaborating with Chavez and Nyberg in both the upper- and the underworld, respectively, he completed two tasks still on his list, the second more important than the first.
First he called an 071 number and encountered the first phone sex in his life. In a simpering voice a woman exhibiting some symptoms of dyslexia read from a script what she would do with his penis. Since the aforementioned organ remained completely limp the whole time, it would have been difficult to implement any of these acrobatic maneuvers. He then called the business registry at the Patent and Registration Office, but the only address for the simpering company JSHB was the post office box listed in the newspaper ad, a box number in Bromma. So he ended up having to drive over to the post office on Brommaplan and simply wait. He positioned himself so that he could see the post office boxes through the window and smoked a couple of cigarettes in the sweltering heat more typical of the height of summer than the month of April. Temperatures that had undoubtedly been stolen from July and August. And he waited. He kept box number 1414 in his sights for almost three hours
