Europa Blues (32 page)

I am going to describe time. I think I have already done it. Time consists of two things: a clock and a tower. The tower exists so the clock can function. The clock exists to honour the tower.

The clock is our soul, the tower our body.

Though we are here to prove that the clock is substance. That the clock is simply the mechanism driving the hands forward. The same movement for all eternity.

Or until the tower falls.

I have seen it shudder. A bomb was about to fell it. A bomb was about to fell time.

Let me describe time.

Time has a white base. That base may well be quadrangular. Then comes the black. The black is made up of three parts. The lowest of these is hexagonal. On three of these six surfaces, every other one, there are two windows set one above the other. The lower window is slightly larger than the upper. And immediately above the upper window, the next section begins; the middle. It is just as black and shaped like a small, domed cap. This is where the clock sits. Finally, the spire. The spire is black and looks to be needle-sharp.

I am Jewish. I have never understood why churches must look so sharp. Our synagogues do not. I have always thought they look like breasts. Mothers’ breasts.

Why am I describing time in such detail? Because soon it will no longer exist. Because the next bomb will fell it. Because it is already trembling in the breeze.

Because time is about to die.

19 February 1945

Erwin is dead. He was a kind soul. One of the three officers told me. The kindest of them. He is less German than I, and very blond. He looks so sorrowful.

He kills with sorrow in his eyes.

Not the other two. One kills out of curiosity. He is not cruel, simply cold. He watches, observes, writes. But the man with the purple birthmark on his neck, a mark in the shape of a rhombus, he is cruel. He wants to kill. I have seen that look before. He wants you to suffer. Then you can die. Only then is he happy.

I do not know their names. They give no names. They are three anonymous murderers. They are not alike. Not even murderers are alike.

Erwin died of pain.

He is no longer living inside me. I felt him die, and with that I also felt myself die.

Tomorrow, if time still exists, I will write about when I died.

20 February 1945

Her voice speaks to me each night. Always the same words: ‘Why do you want to wait for death? Think of Franz, at the very least.’

I thought I had been thinking of Franz. That is my only defence. He came up to my navel. We could talk. I asked him: ‘Do you want us to run, Franz? We’ll have to leave everything behind.’ And he replied: ‘No.’ I listened.

Of course, I am lying. It is pathetic, lying when I have one foot in the grave. I know not why I wrote that. Why did I write that, God?

No. You won’t answer.

Franz replied the way I wanted him to reply. I asked him simply so that he could say ‘No’. How could he have said anything else?

I was the one who wanted to stay. I couldn’t leave Berlin. It was my city, my country, my life.

And so I denied them.

That was when I died.

I promised I would explain today. I promised myself.

They took Magda and Franz away to shoot them. Magda was caught stealing bread from the soldiers’ barracks. They shot them.

And I did not lift a finger. They would have shot me too, had I done so.

I don’t know what kind of peculiar survival instinct that was. I already knew that I was dead. Why did I choose a long, drawn-out, painful death instead of choosing to die reconciled with my family?

Time is falling now. Here, before my eyes. As I write. The black tower and its old timepiece, the brickwork which has stood for hundreds of years – this very moment, it is falling. The church windows clink delicately with the clamour of the bombs, and framed by the ash-grey smoke of this doomed city’s judgement day, a colourful cloud of glass fragments rises.

It could have been beautiful.

21 February 1945

My name has reached the top of the list. Time has fallen. I saw it fall.

The kindest of the three officers came in to tell me. I would have an hour to prepare myself.

Soon, the little bandage will be pressed to my temple. Someone will watch me through their cell window and think that it is glowing like a lantern.

I do not know what I should say. Soon, the pain will hit me at a level I never thought possible.

That is the price of my betrayal.

HE HAD TO
admit it. He loved this case already. A couple of days had passed, information was flooding in from both Milan and Stockholm, and he was starting to realise that this was no ordinary case.

It certainly wasn’t ordinary. And nor was Commissioner Italo Marconi. There was something about him.

‘
A very good friend?
’ he asked, fixing his gaze on the man on the other side of the table.

The man on the other side of the table said: ‘That was how he put it. He was very careful to emphasise it.’

Marconi shook his head. His moustache bristled like reeds in a sea breeze.

‘Signor Sadestatt,’ he said eventually, ‘you think I am Marco di Spinelli’s very good friend?’

‘Not at all,’ said Söderstedt. ‘But he wanted me to think you were. Why?’

‘Because he once managed to get me to gang up on another policeman,’ Marconi said with sorrow in his voice. ‘I reported him for being corrupt. I was wrong, but I only found evidence of that once he’d committed suicide.’

‘He likes playing with the police,’ Söderstedt nodded, trying to imagine himself in a similar situation. Arto Söderstedt accusing Paul Hjelm of being corrupt. Paul Hjelm committing suicide. Arto Söderstedt finding out that Paul Hjelm was innocent.

It was impossible.

The situation was so terribly different.

He hoped that would be the case.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, thinking that it sounded pitiful.

‘Me too,’ said Marconi, pulling himself together.

‘So he doesn’t want to play with me any more?’ Söderstedt asked.

‘Doesn’t seem to. He’s refusing to meet you. What is it you think you’ll achieve with a new meeting?’

‘I want to press him a bit more.’

‘You don’t
press
Marco di Spinelli.’

‘No, you can,’ said Söderstedt, ‘you just can’t let him realise you’re doing it.’

‘I’m not even sure I’ve understood what you think you found out last time? He knew your old Jewish man, Leonard Sheinkman?’

‘I’m fairly sure he came across him sometime during the war. Do we have no idea at all what he was up to back then?’

‘You’ve read his file. His life is well documented – aside from during the war. He was never a member of the Fascist Party, oddly enough. He’s a self-made man from Milan’s poor quarter. He stood out in the convent school he went to and was taken under the wing of a priest who helped him continue his studies. He became a banker early on, and just after the war he took over one of the leading banks in the city. Exactly how and when that previously respectable bank started to be used for criminal activities is still unclear. We’re always looking for evidence, but we never find any. We’re annoyed we can’t find any evidence.’

Arto Söderstedt nodded slowly. Then he said: ‘Was he going to New York?’

‘No,’ said Marconi. ‘He never leaves his palace these days. It’s over a year since he last left.’

‘I thought so,’ said Söderstedt.

He paused for a moment before continuing.

‘I’d like a sketch of Palazzo Riguardo.’

Italo Marconi glanced suspiciously at him.

‘You want a sketch of Palazzo Riguardo?’

‘Yes. Please.’

‘Maybe you can press di Spinelli without him noticing,’ said Marconi, ‘but you can’t deceive me. Are you planning some mischief that might jeopardise my entire investigation?’

‘Absolutely not,’ Söderstedt replied, feeling like a suspect. It was something he was quite used to.

‘So what on earth do you need a drawing of Marco di Spinelli’s palace for?’ the normally so controlled commissioner blurted out. His moustache started to spin like a helicopter’s rotor blade. He got up from his desk and went over to the window. He seemed to calm down. With his back to his Europol colleague, he continued sullenly: ‘I don’t know what you’re up to, Sadestatt, and that annoys me. I’m extremely worried about seeing years of work being ruined as a result of one stupid mistake from you. What were you thinking, going in and revealing confidential information to di Spinelli?’

‘I’ve already tried to explain that,’ Söderstedt said patiently. ‘He already knows it all. What I told him wasn’t news. We know that he knows and we’re
telling him
that we know that he knows. That unknown killers threw the wolverines’ henchman to the wolverines. That his man was about to set up an organised prostitution ring on behalf of the Ghiottone in Stockholm. That those prostitutes then went missing. He knows all that perfectly well. And he’s already hunting for them. It’s better if he knows that we know that too.’

‘And you don’t think he’ll see straight through all this?’ Marconi asked, turning round, immediately more interested.

‘Of course,’ said Söderstedt. ‘And that means he’ll feel pleased. I think he’ll just have realised that he felt pleased during our conversation.
That’s
why he doesn’t want to talk to me any more. I made him feel pleased and now he’s mortified about it. He’ll be wandering around wondering what he revealed while he felt pleased. That uncertainty is good.’

‘Seems like you’re playing his game,’ said Marconi, sitting down with a thud.

‘It’s good if it seems that way,’ Söderstedt replied with a crazy look in his eye. Marconi looked at his facial expression, finding it fundamentally flawed. He nodded and smiled.

‘And that’s why you need a sketch of his palace? Utterly logical.’

Arto Söderstedt smiled too.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Logical is an understatement.’

Marconi was still nodding.

‘So you think …?’

‘Yes. That he’s in danger.’

‘Marco di Spinelli is in danger? Do you know what kind of fantastical security systems that palace has? How many guards he has? Breaking in there would be like breaking into Fort Knox.’

‘You know you agree, Commissioner,’ said Arto Söderstedt. ‘They’re coming for him.’

‘Who are?’ Italo Marconi asked, without really asking.

Arto Söderstedt’s answer wasn’t quite an answer.

‘The Erinyes.’

IT WAS FRIDAY
12 May. Time had started moving more sluggishly. It would probably be possible to relax a little at the weekend.

But time was also being difficult. It wasn’t acting like normal.

It was probably out of sync.

Paul Hjelm suspected it was because there was a spanner in the works. Whenever the prelude to a chain of events was clear, time would trundle on like normal. Whenever the past was in order, with conflicts and injustices being discovered and revealed, and wounds were being healed, a certain degree of reconciliation was possible; time could move in a nice, linear fashion. But whenever the past was in some way false, deliberately falsified, then history would start to rot, a fly would appear in time’s ointment, a spanner in its works, and time itself would start to act strangely. That was one theory, anyway.

Time was out of sync and who was Paul Hjelm to put it right again?

It would be a painful process.

Times of misfortune, that was what people used to call it. Back when people hoarded, built barricades, and refused to let any damn person cross their bridges. All while they hoped that their children would be born with one head rather than two.

They never understood that their behaviour was the very reason their children were occasionally born with two heads rather than one. Precisely because they always refused to let any damn person cross their bridges.

‘Wake up.’

‘Time is falling now. Here, before my eyes. As I write.’

Leonard Sheinkman’s words had sunk their claws deep into Paul Hjelm. He had deliberately avoided going back to the diary. He knew he wouldn’t be able to read it with a clear, sober and analytical approach, though that was precisely what it needed.

Not that his decision had stopped it coming back to him. In actual fact, Sheinkman’s words were constantly coming back to him. But only diverse phrases. The text in its entirety was still too difficult.

‘Hello, wake up.’

Leo Sheinkman’s fate …

First he convinced his family to stay in Germany rather than fleeing. Then he watched as they were taken away to be shot – he didn’t say a word. After that, he ended up in some kind of unit where he was forced to await his own painful death, something he could literally see coming closer. That was the state of mind in which he had been writing. That was the state of mind in which he had been released. That was the state of mind in which he had come to Sweden. It was hardly strange that he had needed to turn a new page in the book of his life, as his son Harald had put it when they spoke on Bofinksvägen. The newly arrived Leonard Sheinkman had needed to obliterate the past. He had needed to banish it. And so he became a scientist. He came to understand just how the brain worked. He consciously spent his time doing mental gymnastics. And he managed to turn the page. The side on which he wrote his new life was completely blank.

Maybe, every now and then, he had caught sight of a faint, blurred, back-to-front text through the paper.

‘Wake up, for God’s sake!’

‘Wha’?’ said Paul Hjelm.

The whole of the Tactical Command Centre was staring at him. Lots of eyes. He counted twelve of them before he properly woke up.

‘Whoops,’ he said. ‘I think I got lost in a time hole.’