“Monk would turn over in his grave if he knew that his marvelous music had inspired someone to commit a series of murders,” Chavez went on, not sounding particularly sad. They were on the trail. At last.
Again he received no answer from the front seat. That neither stopped him nor annoyed him.
“I went over to headquarters last night, to look at the members of the boards of directors again. Intensive computer work. There are four ways to proceed from here. The most interesting is Sydbanken. All four men were actually on the board at the same time for a brief period in 1990. On the whole, that’s really the most promising lead. But maybe it’s even more interesting that Enar Brandberg was on the Lovisedal board at the same time as both Daggfeldt and Carlberger in 1991, the same media conglomerate that’s having problems with Viktor X’s protection racket today-GrimeBear, you sleepyheads. Assuming, of course, that Strand-Julen was a red herring. On the other hand, if our murderer has presented us with a red herring at this late date by killing Brandberg, then Ericsson and MEMAB will still have to be under consideration.”
Still no answer.
And once again it had no effect on Chavez’s enthusiasm. “I’m sure that Hultin is right, that one of these corporations is the key to the whole mystery.”
The car stopped for a red light.
“Turn at the OK gas station,” said Chavez. “On Rinkeby Alle. We can park where it dead-ends and walk across the square. I need to buy some fresh garlic.”
Hjelm drove down the avenue and parked the car. “You seem a little hyper,” he said.
“The only way to stay awake,” Chavez said.
They crossed the lively square in the summery sunshine. The vendors’ stalls were bursting with vegetables and fruits of all sizes and types, seldom seen in ordinary grocery stores. Hjelm thought about the ban on pesticides in vegetables from abroad, compared to the Swedish ones. He felt gray and dreary in the midst of the bustling, colorful crowds.
Chavez bought a bulb of fresh garlic and waved it in front of Hjelm’s face. “Begone, you blasphemer, Nosferatu.”
Hjelm, who felt as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet, climbed out of his coffin with a foolish grin.
They walked a few blocks to the heart of the Rinkeby district. Half a flight down, in one of the buildings that all looked the same, was a small shop with no visible signage but extremely dusty windows. The shop turned out to be much larger than expected, and it was packed. People of all races were looking through the endless rows of CDs, containing music from every corner of the globe. A group of teenage boys of various colors, united by their baggy clothes and their baseball caps turned backward, occupied the big hip-hop corner. And at the very back, behind the counter, sat a dark South American in his fifties, filing his nails.
“Alberto!” exclaimed Chavez, going over to hug the man, who stood up and proved to be gigantic.
“Jorge, Jorge,” said the man after they’d embraced for at least thirty seconds, then spoke rapidly in Spanish. Hjelm was able to catch the name “Skovde,” to which Jorge answered, “No, no, Sundsvall.” Chavez pointed at his colleagues. Kerstin Holm had just dipped into a stack of Gregorian chants; she said a few words in her slightly faltering Spanish. Alberto laughed loudly. Hjelm smiled at him, noticing that the shop smelled of incense. A stick of it was smoldering in a pot of dried flowers on the counter.
“Come with me,” Alberto said to Hjelm and Holm, then continued in broken but essentially correct Swedish, “Let’s go into my inner sanctum.”
They entered a small, dimly lit room. An exquisite stereo system occupied the absolute center of the space.
“Do you know that Jorge is one of this country’s finest Swedish-Chilean jazz bassists?” said Alberto from the dark.
“Yes, that’s true, that’s true,” laughed Alberto loudly. “May I borrow the tape?”
Holm was the last to enter the room, holding three CDs in her hand. She pulled the tape out of her bag.
“Do you dare leave the shop unattended like this?” she asked as she handed it over.
“Nobody steals from me,” said Alberto ominously, sticking the tape in the player. It started playing toward the end of “Misterioso.” “Really poor quality,” he continued. “Copied two or even three times, I’d guess. Not from any CD. And there aren’t any typical LP clicks either. The original is probably a classic fifties reel-to-reel tape.”
“Here it comes,” said Chavez as the applause and cheering began. Then came the wild improvisations.
Alberto’s face lit up in the dark. “Aaaahhhh,” he said, then uttered an excited flood of Spanish.
“Speak Swedish,” said Chavez.
“Sorry. Of course. This is very, very rare. Even I don’t have a copy. Wait a sec. Let me listen to the whole thing.”
For three minutes, hardly more than that, the chaos continued. Toward the end the playing seemed less chaotic. It was as if the musicians had jointly found a form or shaped a form. It was highly remarkable; even Hjelm could hear the themes looping and passages meeting and combining and melding. Three very strange minutes had passed.
Alberto cleared his throat and stopped the tape.
“ ‘Misterioso,’ taped by the producer and Monk fanatic Orrin Keepnews and the technician Ray Fowler on that magic night, August 7, 1958, at the Five Spot Cafe in New York. On the CD, after Monk died, Keepnews added a couple of numbers that they’d rejected from the earlier Riverside taping on July 9. They’re not included on this tape.
“This must be the thing I’ve heard people talk about but never actually heard before. It seems that this snippet ended up on the tape because Ray Fowler was drunk and fell asleep when he should have turned off the tape recorder. But that might be a myth. This improvisation was given a name afterward: ‘Risky.’ That’s what it’s called.
“You’ve heard people talk about it?” said Hjelm. “When, where, how?”
“I had an offer to purchase a copy sometime in the mid-eighties. By an American jazz musician living in Sweden. But he wanted a thousand dollars. I didn’t go for it.”
“Who was he?” asked Chavez.
“You know him, Jorge. You almost played with him a couple of years ago. Jim Barth Richards.”
“The tenor man?”
“Exactly. White Jim. The whitest skin I’ve ever seen on a jazz musician. A little like Johnny Winter. He stayed here in Sweden. Better treatment here, as he said when we met a year or two ago. He has to go into detox practically every other month. Then he can play again. I don’t know whether he’s playing anywhere right now or if he’s in rehab.”
They thanked Alberto, got the tape back, and were heading toward the door.
Alberto said from the dark, “A copy in exchange for those CDs.”
Kerstin Holm glanced down at the Gregorian CDs in her hand. She had forgotten all about them.
“How long will it take?” asked Chavez, just as Hjelm was about to object.
Alberto laughed and punched a button to open the second cassette door. He took out a tape.
“Already done,” he said with a big smile.
Jim Barth Richards did, in fact, have the whitest skin that Hjelm had ever seen. They were lucky enough to find him relatively sober, in a crappy one-room apartment in Gamla Stan that suited his persona. He was in his fifties, and his hair was as white as his complexion. He was sprawled out flat on a mattress on the floor, wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of the new jazz schools in the States,” said Chavez. “The anti-self-destructive movement. The Marsalis brothers and some even more radical young guys. Don’t you think it’s about time to put this outsider myth on the shelf?”
“Traditionalists!” spat White Jim, in his American-accented Swedish. “They think they can create music by cramming down the whole fucking history of jazz. As if it were a school subject. Where does your fucking pain come from! Books? Fucking mama’s boys! Those who talk don’t know, those who know don’t talk.”
Hjelm and Holm exchanged quick glances.
