Europa Blues (43 page)

Something had happened. Opportunities were arising. They could see just how much suffering went on within the prostitution business across Europe. They realised they could actually do something about it. They become goddesses of revenge. They became Erinyes.

So why, even that very first time, had they used the execution method from Weimar on their victims? Had Magda Kouzmin already understood the connection between the Ghiottone and the Pain Centre?

Did she already know about Marco di Spinelli?

Something else must have happened between her fleeing in August 1997 and the first murder in 1999. She had found out what took place in the Pain Centre in Weimar; she had adopted its methods. How had she found out about it? Had she already linked it to what had happened to her father? Probably not. She probably found that out later, perhaps even this year. When she went after the false Leonard Sheinkman.

How had Magda Kouzmin found out about the method before March 1999?

There was only one way. Through Professor Ernst Herschel’s research group.

Arto Söderstedt had been given a list by Herschel. He fished it out of his laptop bag. What had Elena Basedow said in Weimar? ‘There were plenty of volunteer students, right up to autumn 1998. Unpaid history and archaeology students.’

Magda had left her life as a prostitute in August 1997. She could hardly have become an unpaid history and archaeology student that quickly. Her circumstances must have been chaotic. She had been on the run from a terrifying mafia organisation and needed to keep her head down. Besides that, she would have needed to detox and come to a decision about her future. That probably wouldn’t have been possible until somewhere around the new year, 1997–1998. Unpaid history and archaeology students had been involved until autumn 1998. That narrowed things down to roughly the first half of 1998.

Söderstedt worked through the list. According to Herschel, the voluntary students hadn’t been given access to a particularly large amount of information, but there must have been ways of getting round that. She could hardly have pretended to be an established historical researcher.

Which workers had joined during the first half of 1998?

There were seven names listed as having started in spring 1998, disappearing when the building was closed for renovation in the autumn of that year. Of those names, five were women. They were: Steffi Prütz, Maryann Rollins, Inka Rothmann, Elena Basedow and Heidi Neumann.

Arto Söderstedt looked through their names one by one.

He had met Elena Basedow, of course. She was still working on Herschel’s so-called ‘assistant staff’. The alert young woman who had come to meet him on the platform in Weimar Hauptbahnhof.

‘Herr Söderstadt.’

He could cross her off.

But as he looked through the four remaining names, something happened. It was her forename. Magda, after her paternal grandmother. But there were, of course, two grandmothers. The Kouzmin woman, who had taken care of the orphaned Franz Sheinkman in Buchenwald. What had her name been?

Elena Kouzmin.

Arto Söderstedt was motionless.

Elena.

He had met her.

Only a few hours earlier, he had met her.

A wave of ice ripped through him.

The leader of the Erinyes had given him a lift in her car. A Volkswagen Vento. In Weimar.

Elena Basedow was Magda Kouzmin.

The woman who fed Nikos Voultsos to the wolverines, heaved Hamid al-Jabiri like a wheelbarrow across the platform in Odenplan and hung Anton Eriksson aka Leonard Sheinkman upside down from an oak in Södra Begravningsplatsen.

He dialled Ernst Herschel’s number and asked: ‘Elena Basedow, who met me at the station – has she been working for you long?’

‘She doesn’t work for me.’

‘What?’

‘I came to Weimar yesterday, to go through a few things in my office. I was staying in a hotel overnight. We happened to meet in the evening, and I remembered her from our work on the Pain Centre. In the morning, I asked her whether she couldn’t pick you up from the station in my car, since I had a couple of errands to run.’

‘How was she?’ Söderstedt asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How was she in bed?’

‘My God.’

‘I’m serious,’ said Söderstedt. ‘How was she in bed? It’s important.’

There was a moment of silence.

‘I’ve never known such pleasure,’ said Professor Ernst Herschel.

Söderstedt thanked him and hung up. He sat there for a moment, wallowing in his thoughts.

What had she been doing there?

What additional information had she needed?

He recalled all that had happened between them. It was less than five hours ago. Her gaze on the platform. That first look? A quick, sharp, shy look.

If she – like di Spinelli and Herschel – had recognised Pertti Lindrot in Arto Söderstedt, she had managed to hide it very, very well.

And of course she had.

What was the next step?

It came to him via an agitated woman’s voice.

‘We’re really starting to get tired of asking you now.’

Arto Söderstedt looked up and saw a furious air hostess with her hands clamped on her hips.

‘Sorry?’ he said in confusion.

‘The plane landed half an hour ago,’ the hostess replied.

ARTO SÖDERSTEDT WAS
wearing sturdy climbing shoes and a thick jumper with reinforced elbows. In addition to that, he had on a pair of military-green trousers with a large number of pockets.

He had checked in to a hotel in the immediate vicinity of Palazzo Riguardo. Now he was sitting in his room, looking at his watch. 4 a.m. He set out into the Milanese night.

Outside, the sky was black. The people of Milan were still enjoying their beauty sleep. He could hear no more than a car or two in the distance. The stars were gleaming from the depths of the heavens; the moon was nothing more than a thin slice.

He crossed a small park and found himself at the end of an alleyway. On one side, the smooth outer wall of a building. On the other, the rear of Palazzo Riguardo, its few solitary windows set high up in the wall.

Söderstedt could see a circular vent with a heavy-looking cover. It was sunk into the thick pink wall of the building.

He watched the two surveillance cameras slowly, slowly rotating on their axes. He waited.

When the cameras reached the outermost points of their motions, he rushed into the alleyway and pressed himself up against the wall opposite the palace. He glanced at his watch and waited. The cameras turned and began to move back, each turning in a different direction.

The key dangling from his hand was trembling slightly.

His eyes were fixed on his watch. Four, three, two, one.

Zero.

He ran. Straight over the alleyway. Key quickly into lock. Vent lid quickly opened. And in he jumped. Into the unknown.

He heard the lid slam shut in the alleyway as he was transported into the palace through a pitch-black, downward shaft. Then he landed in a container with a bang.

He was surrounded by a terrible stench. Rotting fish. He couldn’t see a thing and the air seemed thin. He lay on the rubbish like a shapeless lump, desperately trying to breathe calmly. He put the key into a pocket which he fastened shut with Velcro. He groped after another pocket and made out the contours of the small pistol he had found in the envelope from Marconi. ‘A purely hypothetical pistol, I assume,’ Söderstedt had said. He let go of it and allowed his hand to wander to yet another pocket. He pulled a small torch out of it and switched it on.

He really was lying on a pile of rubbish. Ants were running back and forth over the remnants of old fish. A couple of small, black worms were wriggling in and out of the eye sockets of a fish head. He could feel a rising wave of nausea he simply had to force back. He had no alternative.

He pointed the bright beam of light up at the roof of the rubbish container. Sure enough, he could make out the mouths of four chutes, each around half a metre in diameter. He found the shaft he had come in through. It was behind him. Slowly, he got to his feet. He could stand, provided he hunched right over. He moved past the first of the chutes in the left-hand corner of the container. At the second, he paused and put his head into the hole. He grabbed the torch and shone it upwards.

The chute turned into a shaft which sloped off to one side at an angle of sixty or so degrees. Beyond that, he could see that it turned sharply upwards. From there, it would be a seven-metre vertical climb.

He just hoped no one would throw anything out from the little kitchenette at four in the morning.

On the other hand, someone might hear him.

The chute was made from metal, probably some kind of aluminium alloy. Any careless movements would, in all probability, echo quite well, even if the pipe was flush against the thick stone walls, dampening the sound.

He also realised that he stank.

They would be able to smell him from a mile away.

Marconi: ‘Try to take a complete change of clothes. Choose trousers with as many pockets as possible. Purely theoretically, of course.’

Getting from the container into the chute would be the most difficult thing. Standing with his head inside its mouth, he was up to his shoulders. That meant he needed to jump as high as he could, lock himself into place, get a firm grip with the reinforced elbows and wriggle his way up until he could get a grip with his feet. The angle of the pipe made it slightly easier.

He jumped and locked himself into place. He got a grip with his elbows and wriggled up so that his feet were in place. It worked.

Now he was stuck in the slanting part of the shaft. He shone the torch up, ahead of him. Even this short stretch of pipe felt endless. He had to preserve his strength. He would need it for the vertical climb.

This was simply a prelude.

It took time. He inched slowly, slowly upwards. He knew he was using more energy than he should.

It took him almost fifteen minutes to move those eight or so metres. Once he made it, he sat down in the bend where the chute became vertical and caught his breath. He opened yet another of the pockets in his trousers and pulled out an energy drink. He guzzled it down, shoved it back into his pocket and waited for his breathing to calm down. He felt the energy from the drink reach his bloodstream and his powers were restored.

He shone his torch upwards in the vertical shaft. A huge number of metres above him, seven hundred or so, it looked like, the chute bent once more and continued upwards at a slant.

The final furlong.

He started to haul himself upwards. It was hard work, but he soon found a rhythm to it. He was hitting the sides hard, but despite his efforts, he wasn’t making much noise. In the midst of the crossfire of his quick, echoing breaths, he paused to feel pleased that he wasn’t making more noise.

That was when the bag of rubbish suddenly appeared.

He heard the lid of the rubbish chute opening above him, so he was ready. He held his breath and pushed against the walls with all the force he could muster. He waited as the noise grew louder and louder. He strained his neck muscles as hard as he could. And then the bag hit him on the head with a clang.

He could smell the stench.

Leftover shellfish.

Despite the unfortunate circumstances, he managed to think. He didn’t want to let the bag move past his head in case it got stuck somewhere next to his face or chest. It would be better to take it up with him, on his head, and then try to get rid of it when he got to the bend. A bend automatically meant more room.

And so he climbed the last three metres with the bag of rubbish on his head like some African woman balancing a barrel of water.

Sure enough, when he came to the bend, he managed to coax the bag down. He wedged himself into the bend with his feet pressed against the vertical wall and held the bag over the abyss.

Did he dare drop it? If they heard it fall now, several minutes after they threw it away, it was bound to catch their attention. But on the other hand, he was quite deep within the walls of the building.

He let it go. It didn’t make much noise on its way down to the container.

He swung the torch upwards. Again, the chute was slanting, this time close to seventy degrees. Six or so metres up along the shaft, he could make out the inside of the cover. Only a few minutes ago, it had opened. If it opened again, he would be discovered; they would shoot him and he would fall down into the container like any other piece of rubbish.

They might have managed to fill another bag by this point.

But on the other hand, there wasn’t really any going back.

He struggled on, inch by inch. The elbows on his jumper had started to wear away and he could feel the rough stone walls clawing greedily at his increasingly bare skin.

He was so high up now that he could see the lid without straining his neck. He opened the Velcro on the pocket containing the gun. How quickly would he be able to whip it out? he wondered. Without losing his grip and falling headlong into the shaft.

Inch by inch, centimetre by centimetre, closer, closer, closer. His elbows were skinned. He could feel the blood oozing out. And still he continued, inch by inch, centimetre by centimetre, until he reached the lid.

He carefully placed his fingertips on the metal, grabbed a monkey wrench from yet another pocket and clamped it to the inside of the handle mechanism with as much delicacy as he could. His hands were shaking. For a few seconds, they caused the wrench to rattle gently against the handle. Then it was in place.

He took a deep breath and held the monkey wrench utterly, utterly still.

Slowly, he began turning it anticlockwise.

As he turned it, he thought of the consequences. Just fifteen minutes earlier, someone had been here and thrown a bag of rubbish down the chute. How did he know that person wasn’t still on the other side of the wall? It was true, he couldn’t hear a sound from inside the palace, but it would have been enough if di Spinelli was in his love nest – the room next to the kitchenette. It wasn’t his usual bedroom, but maybe he’d had a prostitute there overnight. They might have been eating lobster and drinking champagne. He was just grateful it hadn’t been a champagne bottle landing on his head.