In the car on his way into town he thought about what Pluto might mean for Tova: a cute Disney dog, the most distant planet in the solar system, or an archaic god of death.
When he entered the office, Chavez hadn’t yet turned on the computer. That was very unusual. He was sitting at his desk, grinding coffee beans. “It’s going to be June soon,” he said tersely.
“Do you have plans for the summer that are going to end up frozen?” said Hjelm as he sat down.
“I suppose
“Who was it?”
“No idea. I forgot to ask.”
It was a fundamental dereliction of duty, but Hjelm stopped himself from criticizing his colleague. “What did he sound like?”
“What did he sound like? Someone from Goteborg, I think.”
“Ah,” said Hjelm with renewed hope. He punched in a long string of numbers and waited. “Hackzell?” he shouted into the phone. “Hjelm here.”
“I think I’ve come up with something,” said Roger Hackzell, his voice crackling on the line from Hackat & Malet in Vaxjo. “Something actually did happen a couple of years ago when I played a jazz tape here in the restaurant.”
“Don’t go anywhere!” Hjelm slammed down the phone. Already out to the hall, he said to Chavez, “Tell Hultin that Kerstin and I have gone to Vaxjo. We’ll be in touch.”
“Wait!” yelled Chavez.
Hjelm rushed into room 303. Gunnar Nyberg and Kerstin Holm were sitting there singing a complex Gregorian chant. He stopped and stared at them in astonishment. Without seeming to notice him, they sang to the end. Chavez threw open the door behind him and also halted abruptly. When they were done, Hjelm and Chavez applauded for a long time. Then Hjelm said, “I think we’ve got a nibble regarding the cassette tape in Vaxjo. Want to come along?”
Kerstin Holm wordlessly put on her little black leather jacket.
“Is there room for me?” asked Chavez.
The three of them flew to Vaxjo. Jorge’s presence made any intimate conversation between Paul and Kerstin impossible. Neither of them seemed to mind. Their tunnel vision had been activated.
Just after eleven o’clock they found Roger Hackzell inside Hackat & Malet. The restaurant had just opened for early lunch customers.
Hackzell showed them in to his office, leaving the restaurant in the hands of a waitress. “Misterioso” was playing loudly inside the office. Hackzell turned off the tape player, which was set up to play the same tune over and over.
“Yes, well,” he said, motioning for them to sit down on the sofa. “A couple of days ago I got a feeling that there was something special about that tune, so I’ve been listening to it like a maniac. And then I remembered. It was late one night a few years back. We’d been running the restaurant here in town for several years and were the only place open until three A.M. It could get a little rowdy, with all the late-night partiers gathered here. Later the rules were changed, and now we’re open only until midnight. On that particular night, though, the restaurant was deserted, and I was just about to close.
“There were two men still here. One of them, Anton, big as a house, requested that I play this tape again. I had just played it and then put in a new one with some rock music. But Anton had a kind of crazy look in his eyes, and he wanted the jazz back on. So I put in the tape again, and I’m positive that it was this tune. Then he started shouting wildly and lit into the other guy, punching and pummeling him.
“I remember it all very clearly now; it was nasty as hell. Anton kept screaming the same thing over and over. I can’t recall what it was, something really incoherent. He was drunk as a skunk, and I was fucking scared. First he delivered a couple of blows to the stomach, then a kick to the knee and one to the groin, and finally a hell of a knockout punch right on the jaw, making the guy’s teeth fly. He fell to the floor, and Anton kicked him as he lay there, again and again.
“But he was conscious the whole time, the guy who was lying there getting beaten; he just stared up at Anton with a strange expression. Then Anton stepped back to take aim for a fucking big kick that definitely would have killed the guy. I screamed at him. Anton stopped himself and instead picked up a bottle and hurled it against the wall. Then he left.
“I helped him up, the guy who was lying on the floor. He was beaten real bad, his teeth were rolling around under his tongue, and he spat them out, one after the other. One arm was hanging limply, bent at an odd angle, and he had terrible pain in his stomach and abdomen. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ I said, ‘and an ambulance.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘he was totally justified.’ That’s what he actually said about the lunatic who had just beaten him to a pulp: ‘He was totally justified.’ Okay, I thought, it was great not to have to bring in the police, because then we’d lose our nighttime license. I helped him sop up the worst of the blood, and he left. And that was it.”
“I think that’s good enough,” said Hjelm. “This Anton, who is he?”
“Anton Rudstrom is his name. He’d opened a gym here in town-that must have been back in 1990. But when this happened, it was about a year later, in the spring, and the gym had gone bankrupt. He’d gotten a bank loan without having to provide any collateral-you know how easy that was in those days-and then he couldn’t pay it back. That happened a lot in the late eighties. At the time of the episode in the restaurant, Anton had just started on his drinking career. Now he’s a full-blooded alcoholic, one of the drunks who usually hang around outside the state liquor store.”
“Although he still looks like a bodybuilder,” said Hjelm pensively, amazed at the coincidence.
Roger Hackzell, Kerstin Holm, and Jorge Chavez all looked at him in surprise.
“What about the other man?” said Chavez. “The victim. Who was he?”
“I don’t know. I’d never seen him before or since. I don’t think he was from here in town. But he was a fucking expert at darts, I do remember that. Stood there for several hours, throwing them.”
“Throwing them?” said Kerstin Holm.
“Darts,” Roger Hackzell clarified.
He was sitting with a group passing around a bottle of cheap Rosita sherry. He was the youngest and the biggest on the park bench.
“I thought vodka was your poison,” said Hjelm.
Anton Rudstrom recognized him at once.
“Will you look at that!” he said jovially. “The Stockholmer with the taste test. Gentlemen, you see before you the man who gave me a half bottle of vodka so that I’d drink more vodka.”
“Hell, I was sure you were making him up,” said an old, toothless man, stretching out his hand toward Hjelm. “I’d be willing to help with a taste test.”
“No taste test this time,” said Hjelm, showing them his police ID. “Now clear out.”
Rudstrom tried to clear out too, but without success. “Right now I want to hear a little about the fight in the restaurant Hackat & Malet in the spring of ’91,” said Hjelm, sitting down next to the man. Chavez and Holm remained standing. Neither of them seemed particularly impressive compared to the enormous Rudstrom.
“I don’t know anything about that,” he said sullenly.
“We’re not here to arrest you. There’s not even a police report about it. Just try to answer my questions as precisely as you can, and there’ll be another half bottle in it for you, I promise. First we’d like to know why you wanted to hear that particular piece of jazz called ‘Misterioso,’ by Thelonious Monk, while you beat that man to a pulp.”
Anton Rudstrom paused to think. He had to dive down through cubic yards of ethanol to return to the opposite shore. He fumbled his way along its shifting sands.
“I remember vaguely that I was about to kill somebody. That was after the plug was pulled for good.”
“You owned a gym, right?” Hjelm ventured.
“The Apollo,” said Rudstrom cockily. “The Apollo Gym. Fuck.”
“Tell us about it.”
