“They create something new by knowing about everything,” Chavez insisted. “That’s not so damned strange. They’re familiar with every riff, every little passage, every damn run in the history of jazz. That’s where they get all the power and all the pain they need. They can build on your conquests without having to repeat your mistakes. It’s a whole new way of relating to art.”
“It’s an
“You’re the ones who are repeating yourselves, precisely because you don’t know your own history. You think you’re creating something new just because you’re too drugged out to notice that you’ve done it all before. The personally unique expression is one long, damned repetition, the worst kind of self-delusion. The only way to really create something new is to become familiar with everything that has already been done. Then you can talk about a new beginning. The dawn of history again, but a dawn that contains within it all previous dawns.”
“Theoretical bullshit,” said White Jim, boiling over. “All the pain comes from in here!” He slapped his bony chest, where every rib was visible through the dirty T-shirt. The slap produced a disquieting echo. “You can never replace direct feeling!”
“That’s exactly the point!” shouted Jorge, beginning to pace in the filthy apartment. “There’s no direct outlet from in here. That’s not where you get it from. The pain always has to take a path through various forms. It’s just that you don’t see it. You mistake the fog of drugs for emotion and try to invent the wheel over and over again, and each time you think you’ve done it. Authentic bullshit!”
Hjelm was starting to get worried that they might lose White Jim before they even reached him. There seemed to be a high risk that they’d get thrown out at any moment. But instead, Richards sat up, uttered a loud bellow of laughter, and patted the palm of his hand on the mattress.
“Sit down, for God’s sake!”
Jorge sat down, accepted the bottle of Jack Daniels that White Jim had conjured up from somewhere, and took a big gulp.
“You should have gone in for music,” said White Jim. “Instead of all that.” He pointed at Holm and Hjelm. “You take it seriously.”
“Those two know more about music than you do,” said Chavez. They both laughed for a long time. Hjelm understood very little. Kerstin Holm said calmly, “For example, we know about a tape of a little improvisation called ‘Risky,’ played by Monk, Griffin, Malik, and Haynes, which you tried to peddle ten years ago.”
White Jim looked at her in astonishment. Then he roared with laughter. “Quite a long investigation, I must say. But all the priorities in the right places. Three cops come after an old sax has-been for a triviality. I’m deeply honored, people!”
“We’re not here to arrest you. We just want to know who your customers were.”
“Not many people actually bought a copy, you know. When Red Mitchell brought me here in the mid-seventies, I’d heard that you were a small country up by the Arctic Ocean and that you loved jazz. So I made as many copies as I could of that session, plus a number of other original tapes that Griffin had turned me on to in the early sixties. I was playing a lot with Johnny back then, you know, young and green and enthusiastic. He told me there was a lot of unreleased material from the Five Spot period, like ‘ ’Round Midnight’ and ‘Evidence’ and ‘Risky’ and plenty of other motherfucking tunes. Most of them have been released by now, when… what’s his name? The producer? Keepnews. When he needed cash.
“But ‘Risky’ and a few others are my babies. They haven’t been released. So yes, goddamn it, I brought ten different tapes like that from the States, and every once in a while I tried to sell them. This ‘Risky’ tape was one of the last, sometime in ’85 or ’86. By then I knew who my customers were. There were only three; nobody else was willing to hand over big money for semi-lousy pirated recordings. It was fucking illegal, you know. I had no rights to them at all. I still have a couple of tapes left, by the way. For my retirement.”
“Do you still have the addresses of the people who bought copies of the ‘Risky’ tape?” Holm asked doggedly.
“Sure. Since the beginning of the eighties, the buyers have always been the same people. Jazz lovers, maybe. Lovers of rare items, absolutely. If you’re not planning to arrest them, I’ll give you the addresses. Two in Stockholm and one in Vaxjo. Somewhere I’ve got a little fucking yellow notebook…”
They searched through Richards’s disgusting mess of an apartment, casting aside the most astonishing objects: the dried head of a boa constrictor that turned to dust in Hjelm’s hands, filthy clothing, a shoebox containing Polish
“Why are you saving all these pub receipts?” Chavez asked as he pulled the yellow notebook out of a pair of appallingly disintegrating underpants.
“For tax reasons,” said White Jim as he let the Jack Daniel’s burn its way down his throat.
Chavez wrote down the names and addresses on the back of a pub receipt and handed the notebook back to White Jim, who tossed it into the room, belched, and then fell asleep sitting up.
Chavez and Holm laid him down on the floor, then pulled a blanket over the chalk-white body.
“That guy,” Chavez said as they came out into the sunshine, “is a truly great musician.”
Holm nodded.
Hjelm wasn’t sure what to believe.
Chavez returned reluctantly to police headquarters. Hjelm dropped Holm off at the nearest Stockholm address on White Jim’s list, then continued on to the address that was farther away.
Holm went to see the retired major Erik Radholm on Linnegatan. He was a distinguished-looking gentleman in late middle age, with a passion for unusual jazz recordings that was as monumental as it was unexpected. As Holm later described him, he looked more like a Sousa admirer, a man for whom rhythm meant marching in step. But that was not the case. He had an enormous collection of illegal pirated recordings from the most obscure little clubs, from Karelia in Finland to the interior of Ghana.
At first he didn’t want to admit to anything that might be considered illegal. But by using methods that Holm refused to reveal, she got him to relent and, even with a certain pride, show her his impressive collection, hidden behind a bookcase that could be opened out into the room. He swore on “his country and his flag” that he would never dream of copying a single one of his unique recordings. Holm both saw and listened to Major Radholm’s copy of Jim Barth Richards’s “Risky” tape. She stayed for two hours and also heard Lester Young in Salzburg and Kenny Clarke at the Hudiksvall Hotel.
Paul Hjelm drove to Marsta and visited the severely handicapped Roger Palmberg, who had been run over by the Stockholm-to-Lulea train; not entirely unintentionally, as Palmberg himself admitted, talking through his electronic speech apparatus. The only thing still intact was his hearing, but that was even better than before. They listened to White Jim’s “Risky” recording, and Roger Palmberg explained every little nuance, telling him exactly what was happening and precisely where it occurred and why.
Hjelm felt bewitched. He had serious doubts about the expression “Those who talk don’t know, those who know don’t talk.” Inside that devastated body was the most subtle listener he’d ever met, and not just a music listener but a listener in general. Simply by giving Hjelm his undivided attention, Palmberg managed to get him to reveal almost everything about the case. Palmberg thought that the cassette tape lead sounded incredibly interesting. He swore that he was innocent, and in return he received a promise that Hjelm would get back in touch once the case was solved. No one else had ever heard Palmberg’s copy of the recording, until now; he admitted point-blank that it was because no one ever came to visit him. He lived a solitary life, a situation that he had accepted. It was to music that he applied his innate capacity for listening.
So they listened to a couple of recordings of Jim Barth Richards from the late sixties, and Hjelm began to realize who it was he had visited in that repulsive one-room apartment in Gamla Stan. By the time he finally left Roger Palmberg in his relatively handicap-friendly Marsta apartment, he’d acquired a new friend in northern Stockholm.
