Europa Blues (25 page)

Perhaps it was an icy wind.

Perhaps it was the Erinyes.

His fingers touched the yellowed paper. He could feel the distance between the barely legible pencil letters. Ice was growing between them. Between the letters. It would never melt.

Paul Hjelm took off his new reading glasses and placed them on the bedside table, switched off the lamp and stared out into the darkness.

So, he thought, groping for Cilla’s warm body. His hand snaked beneath the blanket, coming to rest between her shoulder blades. She murmured. A sign of life.

So, that was how things could have been. Things could have turned out that way for him, too. If he had been born at the wrong time, to the wrong parents. His own thoughts could have been exactly like Leonard Sheinkman’s during those bleak February days in 1945. Disjointed, loose, but still with great and terrible repressed emotion.

Leonard Sheinkman had been convinced he was going to die back then, but he hadn’t. A few months later, the war had ended. He came out on the other side. He had been utterly, utterly empty, and now faced a choice: stay put and go under or move and make a new life for himself. Become someone else. He had chosen the latter, it had been a possibility for him. But what kind of end had he met? Being hung from a tree in the Jewish cemetery fifty-five years later? How was that possible? What had happened?

At that moment, Paul Hjelm was powerless to go through what he had read and draw any rational conclusions. He was much too moved. That was roughly what he had been expecting – and yet it was completely different. A different tone. Sorrow beyond all sorrow. As though it had been written from beyond the grave.

A weighty German-Swedish dictionary was resting on his stomach. In his left hand, he was holding the pages he had read; in his right, those he hadn’t. The piles were roughly equal in size, meaning he still had half left to read. He was looking forward to it – but he was also dreading it.

Paul Hjelm felt completely destroyed. As though he had been ransacked. In a way, that was what had happened.

Buchenwald, Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp, was seven kilometres outside Weimar in the former DDR. The city had been the European Capital of Culture just one year ago; the place in which Goethe had changed the face of world literature. In 1919, the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, had been founded there. In 1926, the Hitler Youth had been formed there. That same year, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the NSDAP, had held its first party meeting in Weimar’s national theatre. Then, between 1937 and 1945, two hundred and thirty-eight thousand people had been held prisoner in Buchenwald; there had been no gas chambers, but there had been a centre for ‘medical research’. In total, fifty-six thousand people had lost their lives in Buchenwald, practically within sight of Goethe’s Weimar. Between 1945 and 1950, it had also served as a Soviet detention camp for Germans. A further seventeen thousand people had died.

It was the cradle of the European paradox.

Paul Hjelm turned over to turn off the light.

Only then did he realise it was already out.

He fell asleep late that night.

HEARTS WAS BUT
a memory. In the little stone house just outside the medieval village of Montefioralle deep within the hills of Chianti, there was no longer time for computer games.

There was Italian to be read.

It was hard work, going through Commissioner Italo Marconi’s investigation into the Milanese crime syndicate, Ghiottone. New information was also constantly arriving from Stockholm via email, fax and telephone.

Still, if you were a Europol officer, you were a Europol officer.

The aim of The Hague-based European law-enforcement organisation was to increase the effectiveness and cooperation of the competent member state authorities, particularly when it came to preventing and combating terrorism and the illegal trade of drugs, as well as other serious forms of international crime. Europol had been founded in order to make a significant contribution to the European Union’s efforts against organised crime.

‘OK,’ Söderstedt said to his computer as he sat on the porch with yet another glass of Vin Santo in his hand. ‘OK, that was a quote. I confess, computer. I didn’t even know I was a Europol officer when I went to Milan. So, yes: I’m sitting here, on holiday, citing police statutes with myself as the only witness. And you of course, computer.’

‘Who are you talking to?’ Anja shouted from inside the house. She had managed to nurture a rather decent-sized purple ruffles basil plant in the garden and seemed to be quite frisky in honour of the occasion. Now wasn’t the right moment to be unfaithful with a computer.

‘The computer,’ Arto shouted back.

‘Right,’ Anja shouted. ‘Come and see the little ones before they go to sleep.’

‘Where’s Mikaela?’ Arto shouted.

‘Where do you think?’ Anja shouted.

A lot of shouting went on in the Söderstedt family.

Arto immediately forgot her request to say goodnight to the little ones and went back to the computer. Technically speaking, it was the youngest member of the family. Though it was true, he never said goodnight to it.

Instead, without warning, it gave him the name of the old banker suspected of being the absolute ruler of the Ghiottone. His name was Marco di Spinelli.

There were plenty of pictures of this Marco di Spinelli. Di Spinelli was an old, thin, tough-looking man, not at all what you would expect of a Mafia boss. But then, he was also a northern Italian. Active in the separatist movement. Lega Nord and things like that.

There was even a picture of Marco di Spinelli and Nikos Voultsos together. They were certainly an ill-matched pair. The old, aristocratic silver fox dressed in a black polo neck and the coarse Greek in his pale pink suit, unbuttoned shirt, thick chest hair and fat gold chain around his neck. They were greeting one another outside a luxurious-looking restaurant in central Milan. Marco di Spinelli had his hand on Nikos Voultsos’s shoulder, and Voultsos’s smile seemed particularly subservient.

Paul Hjelm had called to tell him about the Erinyes. He had also told him that Voultsos had left a suitcase full of his belongings at the hotel, along with a Visa card number. There had been nothing but clothes in the suitcase; if there had been drugs of any kind in the room, they had long since disappeared into the pockets of unknown employees of the Grand Hôtel. The card number, on the other hand, was interesting. The Swedish arm of Visa had been in touch with the name of the account holder. It was a private limited company called S.A. Contra. Arto Söderstedt phoned Italo Marconi right away to tell him the news.

Marconi said: ‘Sounds about right. S.A. Contra is a money-laundering business at the edge of the Ghiottone organisation. Their accounts are often used for payments here and there. Not that we’ve been able to link any of it to the Ghiottone or di Spinelli, of course.’

Söderstedt thanked him and hung up.

On the whole, he felt like he was starting to get a pretty good understanding of the structure of the organisation. Everything suggested that di Spinelli was the spider in the middle of the web, that all roads led to him.

As though to Rome.

But no matter how much of an authorised Europol officer he now was, Arto Söderstedt was powerless to do the slightest thing about either the Ghiottone organisation or Marco di Spinelli. That much was clear. Milan had countless competent, native policemen and women who had devoted years of their lives to getting at the syndicate. That wasn’t his job; it would be taking on more than he could chew. No, his job was to help them get to whoever had killed Nikos Voultsos, Hamid al-Jabiri and Leonard Sheinkman. Nothing more.

Though going via the Ghiottone was clearly one way of doing it.

The question was whether it was doable. He thought about how best to carry out his job. He didn’t need to think for long. As far as he was concerned, it was utterly obvious.

If anyone knew who had put his henchman to death, it would be the old banker himself.

Seven people, of whom six were serious criminals – all pimps, going by Kerstin’s latest email – had been murdered by the same method across Europe. According to Marconi, there was nothing to suggest that any of these seven were linked to Ghiottone, but it still had to be in Marco di Spinelli’s interests that whoever had killed his hand-picked Greek murderer-cum-pimp disappeared.

Di Spinelli was probably a man who took things into his own hands. He was probably already hunting for the Erinyes with a blowtorch. And it would probably be verging on impossible for a Swedish policeman to be given an opportunity to talk to him. However much authorisation his Europol status gave him.

Arto Söderstedt decided to ask Marconi anyway.

‘Well, it might be a bit of a surprise,’ Marconi unexpectedly said. ‘Blunt, chalk-white Swedish police officer on a personal visit. It could catch his attention. He likes playing games with the police.’

‘Have you talked to him? Personally, I mean?’

‘Many times. I’m practically a regular at his house. He’s not at all shy in that Sicilian no-one-knows-who-the-godfather-is kind of way. On the contrary, for such an old man, he’s really quite hungry for publicity. He’s a politician. Or rather, he’s a kind of politician …’

‘Marco di Spinelli must be what …? Ninety-two?’

‘And swims two hundred metres a day and takes part in sailing races and sometimes drives rallies. They say he likes the Värmland forests, whatever they are. Swedish?’

‘Swedish. I might be able to fake an interest in rallying. I am Finnish, after all. A bit, anyway.’

‘I’ll pass on your request,’ said Commissioner Marconi, and Söderstedt could almost feel – through the telephone itself – that big moustache start spinning.

Arto Söderstedt allowed his gaze to wander over the shade-bathed garden. The trees and bushes had been deliberately planted so that they formed a shadowy canopy. It was a Mediterranean method he was familiar with. As the days passed, the May sunshine seemed to be increasingly convinced that it was a bright summer sun rather than a lousy little spring one. Its self-confidence was growing relentlessly – and, with it, the need to take siestas. Arto had lost count of the number of times he had arrived at this or that shop only to find its shutters closed. What surprised him most was that he never learned from his mistake; like a psychiatric patient on the run, he made the daily journey into Greve only to find the entire town was deserted. Between one and four, Greve shut down – and between one and four, the chalk-white Finn would arrive in his big family car, try a locked door, and produce a series of undefinable noises. You could have set your watch by him.

He needed a siesta, that much was clear.

But now he was sitting in the shade on the terrace, sipping a
very small
glass of Vin Santo and looking at his watch. Two o’clock. Mid-siesta. He had been pleased that Marconi had answered immediately, but now, with hindsight, it struck him that he must have phoned at the worst possible time. Not that it was a problem – Marconi had clearly skipped his afternoon’s rest, just like he had.

He refused to take a siesta.

One way or another, he would probably regret it. But right now, he was distracted. His thoughts were practically running away from him. This from the man who was normally so good at damming the flow and digging channels to allow his thoughts to pour in the right direction. Now, though, they were more like the Danube delta.

If he was given access to Marco di Spinelli, he would need to be prepared. Well read, like a real nerd. But he would also need to repress all that knowledge as best he could from his working mind, so that it didn’t hinder the thought process and his ability to react. Arto Söderstedt sometimes managed to trick suspects into giving themselves away. He often did it by playing dumb – he had that kind of appearance. It was hard to deny that he could look quite vacant.

‘Is Daddy dead?’

He chuckled slightly and gently dipped the tip of his tongue into the
tiny little
glass.

How should he go about grabbing di Spinelli’s attention? How could he get him to loosen his tongue? He had ten or so pictures of the man open on his computer screen and was trying to get a purely visual understanding of him. So far, di Spinelli was still nothing more than a picture. Or rather, a collection of pictures.

He tried to imagine the entire situation, how he would be met, how di Spinelli would act, what they might talk about and – above all – how he would even begin to go about asking the important questions as though they didn’t mean a thing. That was the great, decisive trick.

The thing he had learned from Uncle Pertti.

Arto Söderstedt was an unusually well-educated policeman, there was no denying that, with a past that he would much rather avoid talking about. A career lawyer in Finland by the age of twenty-five, keeping the scum of the earth away from lawful society. Specialising in the richest, most cunning and unconscionable of criminals. And then he had simply turned his back on that mad, dishonest life, fled the country and ended up in Sweden where, after a couple of years of hard work, he became a policeman; he proved much too obstinate for his superiors in Stockholm and was sent to Västerås, where he lived a peaceful, comfortable and utterly intolerable suburban life. Until a detective superintendent with owl-like glasses perched on his enormous nose came stomping into the police station and changed the direction of Söderstedt’s life once more.

In the A-Unit, he had become the joker in the pack. The card a seasoned player would throw down to win the entire pot.

Or something like that.

But despite his varied life, despite the abundance of educational opportunities and pathways which had been available to him, it was Uncle Pertti who had taught him the great, decisive trick.

Pertti Lindrot – hero from the Finnish Winter War, victor at Suomussalmi, the man who had posthumously sent the Söderstedt family on a trip to Tuscany they would never forget – wasn’t a positive figure from the past. He wasn’t one of those relatives who leave fond memories behind in the minds of the children, thus prolonging their lives by a couple of decades.