Europa Blues (42 page)

The young provincial doctor had become an SS officer.

He had been one of those responsible for the Pain Centre in Weimar, and he looked very, very similar to his great-nephew.

Uncle Pertti hadn’t liked it. Tormentor number 1, according to Paul Hjelm’s notes, had been: ‘Very blond, not-German, sorrowful.’ Leonard Sheinkman’s words prior to death: ‘
The kindest of them. He is less German than I, and very blond. He looks so sorrowful. He kills with sorrow in his eyes
.’

Uncle Pertti hadn’t liked it, but he had taken the dental gold all the same. And then he had moved on.

Arto Söderstedt had built his Tuscan paradise on a foundation of stolen Jewish dental gold.

He felt his face turn pale.

His paradise had been paid for with the teeth of hundreds of murdered Leonard Sheinkmans.

He had no choice but to run to the plane toilet and throw up. There seemed to be bucketfuls of the stuff. He vomited his disgust, his dread, his regret, his entire ruined conscience.

I’m trampling on their bodies, his vomit screamed. I’m trampling on their bodies to keep my head up above the shit. I can smell the stench, it roared, I can smell the stench and I’m looking out towards the horizon and pretending I think it’s beautiful and that it smells of seventeen kinds of basil rather than shit and death and bodies.

But suddenly, the feeling of defeat was transformed. Whatever was rising in him was no longer the bile of self-contempt. It was no longer horror at Uncle Pertti’s transformation from war hero to torturer and murderer. It was no longer the repulsion of having a war criminal’s – a Nazi’s – evil blood coursing through his veins. It was no longer the nausea of having used the war criminal’s stolen money.

It was rage.

Pure, simple rage, directed at one person and one person only.

Hans von Heilberg, also known as Marco di Spinelli.

Arto Söderstedt returned to his seat. A moment of turbulence shook the plane.

But the shaking was all his own.

He glanced at his computer screen. On it was a drawing. A drawing of a palace. Through it, a pale, crooked line snaked.

He would bring di Spinelli to account.

It was that simple.

He thought back to his last meeting with Commissioner Italo Marconi. It had ended oddly.

The commissioner had completed his meandering line, twisting this way and that across the drawing. It looked like a child’s shaky pencil line on a comic-book labyrinth. Söderstedt had asked: ‘What do you think Marco di Spinelli did during the war?’

Marconi had put down the pen and fixed his Nordic colleague with his eyes.

‘It’s obvious,’ he had said. ‘He was a Nazi.’

Söderstedt had stared back at him, nodded slowly and said: ‘My God, Italo. You want me to get to him.’

‘I want you to find out who he really is, yes. You might have more luck than I’ve had, Arto, with new starting points and fewer rigid restrictions.’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ Söderstedt had replied. ‘You want me to go in
via that route
.’

Marconi had given him a very quick glance, rubbed his enormous moustache and said, his fingers drumming the drawing: ‘Theoretically – and I’m only talking theoretically here – it’s a classic one-man job. You go in through a vent in the garbage room. That vent opens out onto an alley behind the palace. They empty the rubbish through that vent once a week, using a vacuum pump. The cover on the vent, it’s locked with a strong padlock. And you would need to be quick, you would have to move in a very specific way, because the cameras on the opposite wall move in a fixed pattern.’

‘It sounds completely impenetrable,’ Söderstedt had said.

‘It would be,’ Marconi had replied, ‘if you didn’t know the movements, weren’t familiar with the time frames and didn’t have access to a newly copied key.’

A brown envelope had been placed on the table; it jingled slightly. Söderstedt had looked suspiciously at it.

‘Are you really planning on sticking a blue-eyed Swedish policeman’s head into the mouth of the lion in cold blood?’

‘That was a lot of clichés in one sentence,’ Italo Marconi had said with a faint, practically undetectable smile.

‘Go on,’ Arto Söderstedt had replied, his face unmoving.

‘It’s easier once you’re inside the garbage room. You’re out of the security cameras’ sight anyway. The rubbish is thrown out from three locations within the palace and comes tumbling down into the rubbish bins through wide shafts.’

‘So let me see if I understand, purely theoretically of course. The rubbish bin, it’s covered with a lid?’

‘Absolutely correct. A lid with four tubes coming out of it. The rubbish gets sucked out into the alleyway through one of them; that’s the one you use to get in. That way, you’ll end up in the covered rubbish bin.’

‘The covered, stinking, pitch-black rubbish bin.’

‘I can’t do anything about the stench and the lid, I’m afraid. But a torch solves the problem of it being dark. When you get into the container, there are three pipes leading up, via three different shafts, to different places inside the palace. The closest of them goes to the kitchen, and that’s much too far from the heart of things. The furthest leads to the drawing room of the great hall, and that’s too far away as well – albeit in the other direction. The middle shaft, though, it goes to a little kitchenette belonging to di Spinelli’s most private rooms. His three personal guards know about it – you’ve met them already – and possibly his private secretary.’

‘The one with the glasses,’ Söderstedt had said.

‘Exactly,’ Marconi had unexpectedly replied. ‘Marco di Spinelli’s secret rooms are where he has had prostitutes all these years. His love nest. Other than through the kitchenette, there’s just one door leading to the love nest, and that faces out onto his office.’

‘I only saw one door in his office and it led to his private secretary’s room. The one I came in through.’

‘This door is behind the sixteenth-century tapestries.’

‘And to get there, you have to climb up thirty metres from the rubbish bin?’

‘Seven,’ Italo Marconi had said. ‘Seven metres straight up, plus ten or so on a slant at the beginning and the end. Purely theoretically, I’d recommend strong climbing shoes and a thick jumper with reinforced elbows. The lid to the garbage shoot needs to be opened from the inside with a monkey wrench.’

‘And what the hell do I do then?’

‘You?’ Marconi had asked, staring at Söderstedt. ‘Who the hell mentioned you?’

He had paused and sighed before continuing.

‘You’ve managed to do something that no one else has in a long time. You’ve knocked Marco di Spinelli off balance. I don’t know how you did it, but you did. We have to stir things up, and you could be just the thing we’ve been waiting for. Purely theoretically, that is.’

‘What about the Erinyes?’

‘Well, yes. They’re still a much more abstract thing for us. Maybe you can throw a spanner in their plans, too.’

When Arto Söderstedt had left Italo Marconi’s office that day, he had had absolutely no intention of getting hold of strong climbing shoes and a thick jumper with reinforced elbows, one which provided plenty of grip – that was the kind of thing Viggo Norlander and Gunnar Nyberg got up to, not him.

But things were different now. Back in Leipzig, he had already bought some climbing shoes and a good, thick jumper with reinforced elbows.

And now he understood just how he had managed to throw Marco di Spinelli off balance. It was only partly his doing; his appearance had also played a certain role. He had turned up at the house of Hans von Heilberg – though he hadn’t been Hans von Heilberg for fifty years – and had presented him with his companions from the Pain Centre: first, in his own image, Pertti Lindrot; then, in Leonard Sheinkman’s image, Anton Eriksson. As they had looked at the time.

Of course he had been thrown off balance.

The two motives for revenge converged in Marco di Spinelli. As Hans von Heilberg, head of the Pain Centre in Weimar, he had murdered and degraded countless people. As Marco di Spinelli, leader of the Ghiottone crime syndicate in Milan, he had also murdered and degraded countless people.

He was a deeply unpleasant man.

The Erinyes themselves also united the two motives for revenge, that much was clear. But how? What they were lacking was a woman who had been struck by the evil of the Ghiottone not once but
twice.
First as Hans von Heilberg and then as Marco di Spinelli.

This woman must also have known that the old professor in Stockholm was not called Leonard Sheinkman, and that the Mafia boss in Milan was not called Marco di Spinelli.

In other words, the leader of the Erinyes was a Jewish-Ukrainian former prostitute with links to the research group in Weimar.

Arto Söderstedt sat still for a moment. He let it all sink in.

Then he nodded and pushed a disk into the laptop.

A disk from Odessa.

The Kouzmin file. Franz Kouzmin’s tragic life appeared on the screen and Söderstedt filled in the gaps himself.

Kouzmin, Franz. Born Franz Sheinkman to a Jewish home in Berlin, 17 January 1935. Concentration camp in Buchenwald from August 1940. Slave labour in the war industry. His mother was executed in November 1944. His father was moved to the Pain Centre in Weimar, where he died in 1945. The nine-year-old Franz was used as a test subject in medical experiments and his nose was sawn off in January 1945. A Ukrainian woman by the name of Elena Kouzmin took care of and later adopted him, taking him back to her home town: the war-torn Odessa. The family lived in misery. Franz grew up an adopted, Jewish, noseless urchin. Bullied mercilessly at school, he became an alcoholic young. In 1967, aged thirty-two, he married another alcoholic, and in 1969, they had a daughter. His wife died of alcohol-related throat cancer in 1971. In 1974, their daughter was placed in an orphanage.

At some point during the early eighties, Franz had pulled himself together and started searching for surviving relatives across Europe. He found his father’s name in the summer of 1981. Living in Sweden. He boarded the M/S
Cosmopolit
in August that same year and headed for Sweden to rekindle his relationship with his father – he probably had the ultimate aim of taking his daughter out of the orphanage. He could vaguely remember his father (judging by what his father had written in the diary) as a good figure from the far-flung past. At 18.25 on 4 September, the M/S
Cosmopolit
docked in Frihamnen in Stockholm. Franz came ashore and climbed into an illegal taxi driven by a Finn called Olli Peltonen. He drove him to Bofinksvägen in Tyresö. Franz knocked on the door of his father’s house. His father opened. They didn’t recognise one another. That wasn’t so strange – nearly forty years had passed since they last met. Beaming with joy, Franz stepped into his father’s home. The man he thought to be his father jammed a kitchen knife into his back. What must have passed through his mind in those last few moments of life is impossible to imagine.

Back in Odessa, his daughter had gone to his flat at the end of September. The place was empty. She reported his disappearance to the police. The last words about Franz Kouzmin had been made by his twelve-year-old daughter: ‘Dad had just stopped drinking. He’d been completely clean for a month. And really, really happy.’

That was where his file should have ended. It shouldn’t have been possible to say any more about the sad figure of Franz Kouzmin.

But there were still several pages to go.

‘Save Kouzmin?’ ‘Yes.’

There was
another
Kouzmin. A second file had accompanied the other.

Magda Kouzmin.

His daughter.

Kouzmin, Magda. Born in Odessa to Franz Kouzmin, formerly Sheinkman, and Lizavjeta Kouzmin, née Sjatova, March 1969. Her mother died in 1971, she was in an orphanage from the age of five. Her father died when she was twelve. Early substance abuse. First arrest for prostitution in 1984, at the age of fifteen; some thirty or so more arrests after that, right up to 1997. Abused on twenty or so occasions, hospital treatment required. In 1987, she joined a brothel which provided party officials with prostitutes. Apparently highly appreciated by party officials. Witness statement: ‘Unbelievably good at her job. I’ve never known such pleasure.’ When the Wall came down, the brothel was taken over by the growing Ukrainian mafia which, in 1996, came under the control of an international organisation unknown to the Ukrainian authorities: the Ghiottone. Abused on seven occasions between February 1996 and August 1997. Reported missing along with two other prostitutes by her pimp, Artemij Tolkatjenko, in August 1997. Tolkatjenko moved to Manchester in 1998, and was found murdered near the Old Trafford stadium on 13 March 1999. Magda Kouzmin’s fate was unknown.

Magda. Named after her grandmother, Leonard Sheinkman’s wife.

Magda. Received a phone call from Lublin while she was in Odenplan metro station in Stockholm.

Magda. Leader of the Erinyes.

Magda. Leonard Sheinkman’s grandchild.

In February 1996, Magda’s brothel had been taken over by the Ghiottone. The time following this had clearly been a much more hellish time than before. Seven instances of abuse reported to the police meant at least twenty in reality. By August 1997, she had had enough. It couldn’t go on any longer. She fled along with two of her colleagues. She was twenty-eight years old and almost destitute. She had two options: die or turn a new page.

She chose to turn a new page – but without forgetting the preceding side. On the contrary, she allowed it to shape her entire future. It became her driving force during her detox and training. Her two former colleagues were by her side the whole time. They trained, deliberately, for an entire year. And then came the time for revenge. They set out on the hunt for their old tormentor, Artemij Tolkatjenko, the Ghiottone pimp from Odessa. He had moved to England by that point, presumably – like Nikos Voultsos a year later – in order to take over another group of prostitutes. They murdered him. Maybe they had even rescued others that first time, recruiting them as new colleagues.