Europa Blues (20 page)

Marconi lit a cigarette and held the packet out to Söderstedt, who took one without thinking. Since he had smoked a total of three cigarettes in his entire life, the grappa alone made the next ten minutes bearable.

That and Marconi’s sparse information.

‘So there’s your background,’ he continued. ‘The Italian criminal organisations, though they’ve been overshadowed slightly by the Russians, have started to catch on to these developments in the modern slave trade. They buy in experienced pimps and send them out across Europe to take over independent groups of prostitutes. Nikos Voultsos was that kind of pimp, probably sent there by a crime syndicate here in Milan.

‘As far as we know, the syndicate brought him over to Italy as early as 1993, after he murdered three prostitutes who tried to get away from him in Piraeus, Athens’ seaport. The organisation in Milan, they’re called the Ghiottone, realised he was someone they could use. I’ve spent my entire working life on that organisation and I’ve seen just how deep into north Italian society it reaches. That’s why I’ve had to move forward so carefully.

‘Everything suggests that highly placed individuals of all kinds are involved in the Ghiottone. And that’s why I must also ask you to proceed as carefully as I have. One careless step from your side, Signor Sadestatt, and decades of work will be ruined. It’s important you understand that. You look so white.’

‘I
am
white,’ said Söderstedt, realising that he was more green at that particular moment. ‘It’s my nature.’

He stubbed out the cigarette after smoking only half of it; that had to be enough to count as social competence.

Marconi looked sceptically at the cigarette and the empty grappa glass, and carried on regardless. ‘After a lot of work, we found the spider in the web; we’re fairly sure that the brains behind the Ghiottone syndicate here in Milan is a respected old banker. He was active in local politics and is now one of the driving forces behind Lega Nord, if you’ve heard of it.’

‘Separatist party in the north which wants to split the country into a rich north and a poor south,’ Söderstedt coughed.

‘Roughly, yes. I don’t want to reveal the name of this man here, but the reason we left Nikos Voultsos alone, despite the fact that he was suspected of at least five serious crimes, is that we’re after bigger fish. If we can break Ghiottone from the top then everyone else in the organisation will be biting the dust. Though it seems it was in vain. Your otters took that part of our job away.’

‘I see,’ said Söderstedt, feeling as though a pigment or two was starting to return to his face. Since he still couldn’t remember the word for wolverine in English, he didn’t bother to correct the commissioner’s zoological mistake. Instead, he went on: ‘And the motive for Voultsos’s murder?’

‘Competition,’ Marconi said nonchalantly. ‘As I said, there’s a war going on in Europe. For control of the prostitution. From what we can tell, it was an Eastern European crime syndicate with ambitions in Sweden which killed him. Using badgers.’

Söderstedt nodded. Marconi was clearly planning on going through every single member of the marten family – other than the wolverine itself. It made him feel slightly annoyed.

Marconi held up what looked like a fax.

‘Your assignment has been officially sanctioned, Signor Sadestatt. It seems you’ve been granted a provisional position with the European police agency, Europol. Formally, that means you have full access to my investigation. How is your Italian?’

‘Not quite conversational,’ said Söderstedt. ‘But I can read it fine.’

‘Great,’ said Marconi, handing a cubiform box to his new Europol colleague, who stared at it in confusion. ‘A collection of CDs containing the whole Ghiottone investigation. I’m assuming you have a computer.’

Söderstedt nodded. He had mostly been using his little laptop to play hearts, the banal but relaxing card game which came pre-installed with Windows. He very rarely won.

‘You’ll find the names of all the suspects, including the key figure, the banker. Your contract means you’re bound by professional secrecy and that any indication of anyone but yourself having access to these disks will be treated as a criminal act. Is that understood?’

‘Understood,’ said Söderstedt. ‘One thing, though. The strange method of execution. Have you ever come across anything like it?’

‘You mean the weasels?’ asked Italo Marconi, smiling.

‘No, I mean the wire in the brain. I mean the hanging upside down.’

The commissioner nodded. He had understood. The whole thing with the otters and badgers and weasels was just some kind of game that Söderstedt hadn’t understood – yet. But he knew that he would understand it soon. He resisted.

‘I’ve actually put a few men on to that,’ said Marconi. ‘We’re currently going through murders in our country, looking for similar cases.’

‘I suspected you might be,’ said Söderstedt. He thought Marconi would catch the appreciation hidden in that line.

Marconi’s smile suggested that he had.

He stood up and held out his hand. Söderstedt took it. His respect for the Italian police force had increased markedly.

‘I’ve got a feeling we’ll be hearing from one another again,’ Italo Marconi said, stroking his enormous moustache.

‘Same,’ said Arto Söderstedt, shaking the hand which had been extended to him and turning to leave. As he reached the door, he heard Marconi’s voice.

‘By the way, do you know what
ghiottone
means in Italian?’

Söderstedt turned round.

‘No,’ he said.

‘
Ghiottone
means wolverine,’ said Italo Marconi.

Söderstedt laughed.

Of course it did.

ANDERSSON’S FIRST NAME
was Hubald.

Hubald Andersson.

Gunnar Nyberg didn’t quite know how to handle the fact that a sporty, tough and quite recently qualified twenty-four-year-old policeman with a look that could kill was called Hubald.

Now wasn’t the time for laughing, in any case.

The dark little woman in her fifties was sitting in her office, looking Russian. ‘I’m Ludmila
Lundkvist
, senior lecturer in Slavic languages here at Stockholm University. And you’re Detective Inspectors Gunnar Nyberg and Viggo Norlander, and Police Assistant Hubald Andersson. Is that correct?’

‘Viggo?’ Hubald Andersson said spontaneously.

‘Hubald?’ Viggo Norlander replied spontaneously.

At which both started roaring with laughter.

After that, Ludmila Lundkvist talked exclusively to Gunnar Nyberg, who was clearly a big, level-headed, handsome man in the prime of his life.

‘Are you Russian?’ the big, level-headed, handsome man in the prime of his life asked.

‘Yes,’ Ludmila Lundkvist answered with a smile. ‘I’m from Moscow. I fell in love with a Swede researching Old Russian, Hans Lundkvist. We met when he came to a conference in Moscow in the late seventies. I took a long, winding road out of the Soviet Union and followed him back to Sweden, and then we got married. He died of testicular cancer five years ago. We never had any children.’

Gunnar Nyberg probably hadn’t been expecting such a detailed account, and he was still a little too fresh on the dating scene to realise that he was being flirted with.

‘I’m sorry,’ was all he said.

‘And you, are you married?’

‘No,’ Nyberg replied in surprise, before adding: ‘Divorced.’

Ludmila Lundkvist nodded with another smile, and placed three sheets of paper on the table in front of her.

‘I assume it was you who came up with the idea of writing down what you heard on the phone, Gunnar?’ she said.

Nyberg couldn’t deny it.

‘I thought so,’ Ludmila Lundkvist said, giving him a look that the vast majority of the male population over forty would have seen as sexy. Gunnar Nyberg simply felt confused.

‘I want you to listen to two voices,’ she continued. ‘They’re speaking two different languages that can sound quite similar. Here’s the first.’

She pressed play on a cassette player on the desk. A male voice began reeling off smooth-sounding diphthongs. There was a pause.

In that pause, Ludmila Lundkvist said: ‘The second voice will start soon.’

The second voice began. It sounded similar but different at the same time. The diphthongs were smooth here too, but not in quite the same way. When it was over, the professor of Slavic languages continued.

‘Which of those two languages did you hear?’

Hubald Andersson pointed senselessly at the cassette player. Otherwise, the room was completely still.

‘It’s the same voice saying the same thing in two different languages,’ Ludmila Lundkvist explained. ‘Gunnar?’

Nyberg still couldn’t understand why he had been singled out as teacher’s pet, but he felt the pressure. He delved back as deep as he could in his memory and said: ‘The second. Something about the sound pattern of the first one wasn’t quite right. The diphthongs,’ he chanced.

Ludmila Lundkvist’s face lit up.

‘What about you two?’ she asked with a neutral tone.

‘Maybe,’ said Hubald Andersson.

‘Perhaps,’ said Viggo Norlander.

The professor touched her lip and said: ‘My assessment of your rather disparate combination of letters fits with yours, Gunnar. It’s the second one. The first voice was speaking Russian, the second Ukrainian. Most people don’t even realise that Ukrainian is a distinct language, but it’s spoken by fifty million people. It used to be called “Little Russian” and wasn’t recognised as a language in its own right until the start of the twentieth century. There’s an obvious influence from Polish, by the way, and some of the sounds are midway between Polish and Russian. The most tangible difference in the sound pattern, as you quite rightly called it, Gunnar, is that the unstressed “o” remains where Russian reduces it, and the Russian “g” is a softer “h”.’

She glanced at the bewildered policemen and set the tape playing again.

While it was still quiet, she said: ‘What you heard were the classic opening lines to Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat”. Let’s listen to something else – my attempt at a reconstruction of what you scribbled down. It’s me reading it, since it was a woman you heard. Listen carefully and try to work out whether it fits.’

There was more silence. The cassette player was producing nothing but noise. Like a frustrated television reporter, waiting for a segment which never comes, Ludmila Lundkvist said: ‘It’s coming soon.’

And so it did.

Gunnar Nyberg may have been slightly influenced, but he did think that Ludmila’s sensual voice sounded quite like the one he had heard on the phone he had wrenched from Hamid al-Jabiri’s hand down on the tracks in Odenplan metro station. He said so.

‘It’s quite similar. It could easily have been like that.’

‘Yeah,’ said Viggo Norlander.

‘Why not?’ said Hubald Andersson.

Ludmila Lundkvist said: ‘If that’s true, then the voice is saying – in translation: “Everyone through OK. Three seven two to Lublin.” Then there’s that pause. And then she says: “Cunt” and hangs up.’

‘Cunt?’ exclaimed Hubald Andersson.

‘Like I said,’ Ludmila Lundkvist replied grimly.

Gunnar said: ‘No names?’

‘Unfortunately not, no.’

‘But “Lublin” should mean something to you, Ludmila …’

‘You too, Gunnar. You must’ve heard of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only Yiddish-speaking recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature? In 1960, he wrote a wonderful little story called
The Magician of Lublin.
Lublin is a city in Poland, on European highway number 372, one hundred or so miles south of Warsaw. And not far from the Ukrainian border. The E372 goes straight into Ukraine.’

‘“Everyone through OK,”’ Gunnar Nyberg said thoughtfully. ‘“Three seven two to Lublin.” So “through” probably means “through customs”.’

‘That seems likely,’ said Ludmila Lundkvist. ‘But all together, it supports my interpretation.’

‘It’s very convincing, in any case,’ said Gunnar Nyberg, standing up and holding out his hand. She took it, clutching it a moment too long. He could feel himself staring foolishly at her.

The three men were standing out in the shabby university corridor. There was nothing to look at, nothing at all. The lift arrived, its doors opened. Suddenly, Viggo Norlander said: ‘You’re not taking this lift, Gunnar.’

‘What?’ said Gunnar Nyberg.

‘You’re going to go back to Professor Lundkvist’s room and ask her out for dinner this evening.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Viggo Norlander held the lift doors open, leaned forward towards Gunnar Nyberg and whispered: ‘You’re probably a much smarter man than I am, Gunnar, but I’m better at this than you. I’ve rarely seen such obvious female desire.’

Gunnar Nyberg stared at the closed lift doors for a long while.

Then he turned, back down the corridor. The sound of his pounding heart filled the corridor like African drums.

THREE MEN IN
overalls were wandering around among the broken gravestones, carting away the pieces in wheelbarrows. They handled the lumps of stone like critically injured living beings, on their way to intensive care.

Jorge Chavez was standing in the shadow of the oak where Leonard Sheinkman had hung; when he glanced up, he saw that the bark had been scraped away from a branch about four metres up. He tried to work out how they had climbed the trunk. It didn’t exactly look easy. The branches were thin and brittle, all the way up. Whoever had hanged the old man from the tree must have been exceptionally light, agile and strong.

And unbelievably cruel.

The sun was shining on Södra Begravningsplatsen, wrapping the scene in its redeeming light, but it would probably never be possible to atone for such an unsavoury, cowardly, wretched crime. The perpetrator would probably be doomed to eternal damnation.

The ground in a Jewish cemetery was, after all, eternal – Jorge Chavez knew that much. The cemetery, Bet Hachajim, is permanent and cannot ever be moved. It was a holy place, holy ground, eternity’s courtyard, and it was bound up by a number of unwritten rules which marked its holiness: you couldn’t eat, drink or smoke in the cemetery, you couldn’t take short cuts over the graves, and your head should be covered, as a mark of respect.