Misterioso

“Yeah, well, okay. Let me see. I’d been working out at Carlo’s place all those years, and I finally got a job there. Then I happened to walk past a great vacant space in the center of town, a little expensive, of course-an old boutique of some kind. Well, then I decided to go to the nearest bank and ask for a loan to open a gym there; it was just an impulse, I didn’t have any collateral or anything. And suddenly I was coming out of the bank with a huge loan in my pocket. Everything was going so well back then; it was easy to get a loan.

“I bought the best equipment available and created a real fancy gym. Of course it wasn’t going to make it in little Vaxjo. It took only six months or so for the whole shitload to go bankrupt, and I stood there with a fucking debt in the millions of kronor, with no idea how it all happened. I’d lost everything, just like that.”

Rudstrom snapped his fingers, then floated off to happier hunting grounds.

Hjelm cautiously prodded him back. “It was about that time that you were in Hackat & Malet one night. The only people in the place were you, the owner, and one other person. It was almost closing time. In the middle of the night. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely,” said Rudstrom. “Shit, I need a drink.”

“You’ll get plenty of drinks afterward. Try to think back.”

Anton Rudstrom dove once again into the deep sea. “He was standing in the corner, throwing darts. At least I think it was that night… I can’t really recall.”

“Yes, it was. That’s right. Go on.”

“Well… He was already there, throwing his fucking darts when I came in. The place was packed, but he stood over there in the corner, throwing one dart after another, for hours. It was starting to annoy me.”

“Why?”

“Somebody said something earlier that night… something that made me pay attention to him. Otherwise he’d have been easy to overlook. But somebody said that he was… that he…”

Rudstrom was about to fade away and slip through their fingers. All three noticed it.

“Was it something he said or did?” asked Chavez quickly. “Some annoying behavior? Or maybe something about him personally? Some trait? A particular type of person? Or profession? Was he an immigrant?”

“Something about him personally, that’s what it was.” Rudstrom looked at Chavez in surprise. “He was something that made me fucking mad, and the more beers I drank, the madder I got. I blamed him for all the shit that had been dumped on me.”

“Why him?” said Hjelm.

“He was a bank guy,” said Rudstrom clearly. “That’s what it was. Somebody said that he worked in a bank. Finally it drove me crazy.”

“He worked in town?”

“No, in some hole-in-the-wall town, I think. I’m not sure. He wasn’t from Vaxjo, I know that. I have no clue who he was. But he was a real ace at darts. I hope he wasn’t seriously injured.”

They exchanged glances, all four of them.

“It’s possible that he was injured worse than you might imagine,” said Hjelm. “But not in the way you mean.”

He pressed two hundred-krona bills into Rudstrom’s hand. The man now seemed to be totally immersed in the memory that he’d initially thought the booze had drowned out forever.

“My God, how I hit him,” he said. A couple of tears quietly ran down his steroid-scarred cheek. “My God.”

They were just about to leave when Kerstin Holm crouched down in front of him. “I have to ask you one thing, Anton,” she said. “Why did you want to hear ‘Misterioso’ while you beat him up?”

He looked her right in the eye. “It was such a fucking great tune. But now I’ve forgotten how it goes.”

She patted his arm lightly. “But he probably hasn’t.”

They were so distracted that they ended up at what they thought was an outdoor cafe until they got their hamburgers with a big M on the wrapper. They found themselves sitting on the McDonald’s terrace on the big pedestrian street in Vaxjo. It was afternoon.

“Misterioso,” said Kerstin. “It’s a play on words, typical Monk. There’s an inaudible mist in the title. Behind the mystery, the mysterium, there’s a mist. When you say the word, you don’t hear the mist. It’s hidden by the more pronounced mystery. And yet it’s there and has an effect. It’s in the tune too. The mystery is immediately apparent, intangible, of course, and yet physically manifest. The mist inside is harder to distinguish. But it’s there in the mist that we go astray.”

Hjelm had gone astray. There was something somewhere that he had overlooked, something that had passed him by and yet had been there the whole time; okay, he thought, something altogether physically manifest. Someone had said something. It was driving him crazy.

“Have you thought of anything?” asked Chavez, biting into his Quarter Pounder.

“It’s there, just below the surface,” said Hjelm.

“I know how you feel,” said Chavez, chewing. “It’s like Fawlty Towers, right? A difficult guest is served the wrong dish three times. Basil’s wife, what’s her name? Sybil. She finally serves the wrong dish on purpose. Basil says between clenched teeth, ‘I know how she feels.’ ”

“What does that have to do with any of this?” said Holm in surprise.

“Not a damned thing. Just making conversation, as I’m told it’s called.”

A bank, thought Hjelm, digging through his own memory bank. He came up with nothing, not even a statement of account.

“What do we do if you can’t come up with anything?” said Chavez. “Line up every banker in Smaland in a row and let Mr. Serious Alcoholic take a look at them, one after the other?”

“He must have been treated for the teeth that were knocked out, and the broken arm, if that’s what it was,” said Holm.

“This whole thing is still such a long shot.” Chavez smacked his lips. “Not something we can present to Hultin, at any rate. He beat up a guy listening to Hackzell’s ‘Misterioso’-but it’s a big leap from there to actually having the tape.”

“There’s a connection,” Hjelm said doggedly.

“Okay,” said Chavez. “Does your connection have anything to do with Igor and Igor? It almost has to. The cassette is the only link between the beating in the spring of ’91 in a restaurant in Vaxjo and the ex-Soviet bullets in the upper-class walls in Stockholm. And the path of the tape from the restaurant to the villa in Saltsjobaden follows the same route as Igor and Igor. They took the tape from Hackzell, after all, as partial payment for the Estonian vodka on February fifteenth.”

Hjelm shook his head. The whole thing was unclear. Misterioso.

“Let’s start from the point of view of the banker who was beaten up,” said Kerstin Holm. “According to Hackzell, right after the beating, as he’s spitting out teeth, he said, ‘He was totally justified.’ About the guy who pounded him! Strange, don’t you think? The years pass, the wounds heal, but at the same time the accumulation of distrust, insight, confusion, powerlessness grows-”

“Wrede!” shouted Hjelm, jumping to his feet.

Holm looked at him in surprise.

“Wrede. Jonas Wrede, from the Vaxjo police. He said something about an incident in a bank. I lost it in all the other damn incidents he kept talking about. Albertsboda, or someplace like that. Shit, what time is it?”

“Three-thirty,” said Chavez. “What’s going on?”

“We have to go to the Vaxjo police station,” said Hjelm, and dashed out.

Detective Inspector Jonas Wrede stood at attention three times, once for each member of the NCP Power Murders team that came into his little office. Finally he was standing so erect that the top button of his shirt popped off.

“Relax,” said Hjelm. “Sit down.”

Wrede obeyed the command. Ordered to relax, he sat there looking like a sack of hay.

“The last time I was here, you said something about a previous contact with the NCP. It had to do with a bank incident somewhere.”