deal of pressure, but he showed little sign of it. Hultin stood and shook hands with Hjelm.
“First meeting this afternoon at three o’clock, at police headquarters, the new building. Entrance at Polhemsgatan thirty. What do you say?”
“I’ll see you there,” said Hjelm.
“All right then,” said Hultin. “Now I’ve got to head over to Gamla Varmdovagen to pick up a certain Gunnar Nyberg from the Nacka district. Do you know him? Damned fine officer. Like you.”
Hjelm shook his head. He knew almost no one outside the Huddinge police force.
On his way out the door, Hultin said, “So you’ve got less than four hours to say goodbye to your colleagues for the foreseeable future and collect all your things. That ought to be enough time, shouldn’t it?”
He disappeared but came back just as Hjelm had sat down and taken a deep breath.
“I assume you realize that for the moment this is all top, top secret.”
“Of course,” said Paul Hjelm. “I realize that.”
His first thought was to call Cilla to tell her what was happening, but he changed his mind. He thought about all the overtime hours and about the summer and his vacation, which would most likely be canceled, and about the Dalaro cabin that they had rented at such a good price for the whole summer. But first he wanted to enjoy the moment.
Finally he went over to the break room, unable to hide his joy.
Four people were sitting there, stuffing themselves with the junk food that they’d brought for lunch. Anders Lindblad, Anna Vass, and Johan Bringman. And Svante Ernstsson. They all looked at him with surprise. Maybe the expression on his face wasn’t exactly what they’d been expecting to see.
“I’ve come to say goodbye,” Hjelm said solemnly.
Bringman and Ernstsson stood up.
“What the hell do you mean?” said Bringman.
“Tell us,” said Ernstsson. “You mean to say those fuckers fired you?”
Hjelm sat down across from them and pointed at Ernstsson’s lunch.
“Put the burger in the nuker. I told you-it’s better if the sauce is warm.”
Ernstsson laughed with relief. “Okay, so they haven’t fired you! Tell us what happened.”
“I really have come to say goodbye. You might say I’ve been kicked upstairs.”
“What about Internal Affairs?”
“That ordeal is over. Now it’s the NCP for me, hand in glove with the commissioner himself.”
“So they thought it’d be better to remove you from the shitpile of the southern suburbs and the hordes of blackhead immigrants?”
“Something like that, I guess. It’s… top, top secret, as the man said. You’ll probably be reading about it in the newspapers, soon enough. But right now it’s all very hush-hush.”
“When do you start?”
“This afternoon, actually. Three o’clock.”
“Fucking great! I’ll drive you over to Ishmet’s bakery so you can buy the most expensive farewell honey-oozing cake that he’s got.”
Bruun inhaled the brown smoke from a black cigar and smiled into his beard, which covered a considerable portion of his face. He stretched his arms upward and growled faintly, and a few flakes of ash floated onto his reddish-gray mane.
“So, now I’ve produced yet another bigwig at the NCP,” he said with immeasurable conceit. “And you know that once you’re in over there, they’ll never let you out. Except in a casket. Stamped NCP.”
Hjelm removed his ID badge and service weapon from Bruun’s desk and fastened the shoulder holster around his chest.
“ ‘Another bigwig’?” he asked.
“Hultin was here in the late seventies. Didn’t you know? A hell of a soccer player. Wooden-leg Hultin. The worst centerback in the city. Absolutely no sense of the ball. Instead he specialized in head-butting and splitting open eyebrows.”
Hjelm felt a faint sensation of warmth creep through his veins. It was not altogether unpleasant. “He said he’d read about me in the papers. Lots of goodwill in the media.”
“Oh yeah, Hultin the newspaper hound.”
“Are you still in contact with him?”
“Occasionally I give him a call to remind him of old favors, sure. I think he still plays. On the senior team of the Stockholm police sports league. When he has time, which isn’t often. I can just picture him splitting open the eyebrows of his semiretired colleagues. That’d be a sight for the gods.”
Hjelm decided to ask him straight out. “It didn’t happen to be you who…?”
Bruun dropped the divine mental image of gray eyebrows gushing with blood and gave Hjelm a shrewd look. “It was pure luck that they were setting up a new group right now. The top, top secret A-Unit.”
“There aren’t many ways to get around Internal Affairs.”
“You have to take what you can get. Wooden-leg is always in the back of my mind.” Bruun took one last puff on his cigar, his mouth shaped like the hose of a vacuum cleaner. “Just do a good job, all right? I don’t want to have to go through this shit again.”
7
The A-Unit had its first meeting in one of the smallest conference rooms in the enormous complex of police headquarters, located within the rectangle formed by Kungsholmsgatan, Polhemsgatan, Bergsgatan, and Agnegatan. The original headquarters building, constructed in 1903, still boasts dreams of power; its yellowish expanse faces Agnegatan. It is the central hub of the Stockholm police. The opposite side of the rectangle faces Polhemsgatan, mirroring the entirely different but equally absurd architectural ideal of the seventies. That’s where the offices of the National Police Board are located.
And it was there that Paul Hjelm was headed a few minutes before three P.M. He was expected. A guard showed him on a map near the entrance how to find his way to the small conference room. Hjelm wasn’t paying attention, and so he arrived a bit late.
Five people were already in the room, sitting at a table and looking almost as bewildered as he felt. As unobtrusively as possible, he slipped into a vacant chair. As if on cue, a blond man in his fifties wearing a serious expression and a custom-tailored suit appeared. He took up position at the head of the table, placing his right hand on the telescope-like arm of the overhead projector. He glanced around, looking for a face that he didn’t see. He left the room again, clearing his throat. Just as he closed the door behind him, the door on the other side of the room opened, and in came Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin. He too glanced around, looking for a face that he didn’t see.
“Where’s Morner?” he asked.
The constituents of what was evidently the proposed A-Unit stared in confusion at one another.
“Who’s Morner?” asked Hjelm, not offering much help.
“A man was just here,” said the group’s only female member, a dark-haired woman from Goteborg who was in the process of acquiring the first wrinkles on her face but clearly didn’t give a damn. “But he left.”
“That sounds like him,” said Hultin flatly. He sank heavily onto a chair and set a pair of half-moon reading glasses on his big nose. “Waldemar Morner, the commissioner of the National Police Board, and the official boss of this group. He was planning to deliver a little welcome speech. Oh well, maybe he’ll come back.”
Hjelm had a hard time picturing this distinguished and efficient man with the controlled, neutral voice as a vicious soccer player.
“Okay, you all know what this is about,” Hultin continued. “You are now members of what for lack of a better term and for lack of much else is going to be called the A-Unit. You answer directly to the National Criminal Police, or NCP, but you’ll be working closely with the Stockholm police, primarily with their homicide department, which is housed in the Kungsholmsgatan wing, around the corner from here. Stockholm is the scene of the crime, at least for the moment. All right then.
