Misterioso (32 page)

Kerstin Holm wordlessly put on her little black leather jacket.

“Is there room for me?” asked Chavez.

The three of them flew to Växjö. Jorge’s presence made any intimate conversation between Paul and Kerstin impossible. Neither of them seemed to mind. Their tunnel vision had been activated.

Just after eleven o’clock they found Roger Hackzell inside Hackat & Malet. The restaurant had just opened for early lunch customers.

Hackzell showed them in to his office, leaving the restaurant in the hands of a waitress. “Misterioso” was playing loudly inside the office. Hackzell turned off the tape player, which was set up to play the same tune over and over.

“Yes, well,” he said, motioning for them to sit down on the sofa. “A couple of days ago I got a feeling that there was something special about that tune, so I’ve been listening to it like a maniac. And then I remembered. It was late one night a few years back. We’d been running the restaurant here in town for several years and were the only place open until three
A.M
. It could get a little rowdy, with all the late-night partiers gathered here. Later the rules were changed, and now we’re open only until midnight. On that particular night, though, the restaurant was deserted, and I was just about to close.

“There were two men still here. One of them, Anton, big as a house, requested that I play this tape again. I had just played it and then put in a new one with some rock music. But Anton had a kind of crazy look in his eyes, and he wanted the jazz back on. So I put in the tape again, and I’m positive that it was this tune. Then he started shouting wildly and lit into the other guy, punching and pummeling him.

“I remember it all very clearly now; it was nasty as hell. Anton kept screaming the same thing over and over. I can’t recall what it was, something really incoherent. He was drunk as a skunk,
and I was fucking scared. First he delivered a couple of blows to the stomach, then a kick to the knee and one to the groin, and finally a hell of a knockout punch right on the jaw, making the guy’s teeth fly. He fell to the floor, and Anton kicked him as he lay there, again and again.

“But he was conscious the whole time, the guy who was lying there getting beaten; he just stared up at Anton with a strange expression. Then Anton stepped back to take aim for a fucking big kick that definitely would have killed the guy. I screamed at him. Anton stopped himself and instead picked up a bottle and hurled it against the wall. Then he left.

“I helped him up, the guy who was lying on the floor. He was beaten real bad, his teeth were rolling around under his tongue, and he spat them out, one after the other. One arm was hanging limply, bent at an odd angle, and he had terrible pain in his stomach and abdomen. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ I said, ‘and an ambulance.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘he was totally justified.’ That’s what he actually said about the lunatic who had just beaten him to a pulp: ‘He was totally justified.’ Okay, I thought, it was great not to have to bring in the police, because then we’d lose our nighttime license. I helped him sop up the worst of the blood, and he left. And that was it.”

“I think that’s good enough,” said Hjelm. “This Anton, who is he?”

“Anton Rudström is his name. He’d opened a gym here in town—that must have been back in 1990. But when this happened, it was about a year later, in the spring, and the gym had gone bankrupt. He’d gotten a bank loan without having to provide any collateral—you know how easy that was in those days—and then he couldn’t pay it back. That happened a lot in the late eighties. At the time of the episode in the restaurant, Anton had just started on his drinking career. Now he’s a full-blooded
alcoholic, one of the drunks who usually hang around outside the state liquor store.”

“Although he still looks like a bodybuilder,” said Hjelm pensively, amazed at the coincidence.

Roger Hackzell, Kerstin Holm, and Jorge Chavez all looked at him in surprise.

“What about the other man?” said Chavez. “The victim. Who was he?”

“I don’t know. I’d never seen him before or since. I don’t think he was from here in town. But he was a fucking expert at darts, I do remember that. Stood there for several hours, throwing them.”

“Throwing them?” said Kerstin Holm.

“Darts,” Roger Hackzell clarified.

He was sitting with a group passing around a bottle of cheap Rosita sherry. He was the youngest and the biggest on the park bench.

“I thought vodka was your poison,” said Hjelm.

Anton Rudström recognized him at once.

“Will you look at that!” he said jovially. “The Stockholmer with the taste test. Gentlemen, you see before you the man who gave me a half bottle of vodka so that I’d drink more vodka.”

“Hell, I was sure you were making him up,” said an old, toothless man, stretching out his hand toward Hjelm. “I’d be willing to help with a taste test.”

“No taste test this time,” said Hjelm, showing them his police ID. “Now clear out.”

Rudström tried to clear out too, but without success. “Right now I want to hear a little about the fight in the restaurant Hackat & Malet in the spring of ’91,” said Hjelm, sitting down
next to the man. Chavez and Holm remained standing. Neither of them seemed particularly impressive compared to the enormous Rudström.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said sullenly.

“We’re not here to arrest you. There’s not even a police report about it. Just try to answer my questions as precisely as you can, and there’ll be another half bottle in it for you, I promise. First we’d like to know why you wanted to hear that particular piece of jazz called ‘Misterioso,’ by Thelonious Monk, while you beat that man to a pulp.”

Anton Rudström paused to think. He had to dive down through cubic yards of ethanol to return to the opposite shore. He fumbled his way along its shifting sands.

“I remember vaguely that I was about to kill somebody. That was after the plug was pulled for good.”

“You owned a gym, right?” Hjelm ventured.

“The Apollo,” said Rudström cockily. “The Apollo Gym. Fuck.”

“Tell us about it.”

“Yeah, well, okay. Let me see. I’d been working out at Carlo’s place all those years, and I finally got a job there. Then I happened to walk past a great vacant space in the center of town, a little expensive, of course—an old boutique of some kind. Well, then I decided to go to the nearest bank and ask for a loan to open a gym there; it was just an impulse, I didn’t have any collateral or anything. And suddenly I was coming out of the bank with a huge loan in my pocket. Everything was going so well back then; it was easy to get a loan.

“I bought the best equipment available and created a real fancy gym. Of course it wasn’t going to make it in little Växjö. It took only six months or so for the whole shitload to go bankrupt, and I stood there with a fucking debt in the millions of
kronor, with no idea how it all happened. I’d lost everything, just like that.”

Rudström snapped his fingers, then floated off to happier hunting grounds.

Hjelm cautiously prodded him back. “It was about that time that you were in Hackat & Malet one night. The only people in the place were you, the owner, and one other person. It was almost closing time. In the middle of the night. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely,” said Rudström. “Shit, I need a drink.”

“You’ll get plenty of drinks afterward. Try to think back.”

Anton Rudström dove once again into the deep sea. “He was standing in the corner, throwing darts. At least I think it was that night … I can’t really recall.”

“Yes, it was. That’s right. Go on.”

“Well … He was already there, throwing his fucking darts when I came in. The place was packed, but he stood over there in the corner, throwing one dart after another, for hours. It was starting to annoy me.”

“Why?”

“Somebody said something earlier that night … something that made me pay attention to him. Otherwise he’d have been easy to overlook. But somebody said that he was … that he …”

Rudström was about to fade away and slip through their fingers. All three noticed it.

“Was it something he said or did?” asked Chavez quickly. “Some annoying behavior? Or maybe something about him personally? Some trait? A particular type of person? Or profession? Was he an immigrant?”

“Something about him personally, that’s what it was.” Rudström looked at Chavez in surprise. “He
was
something that made me fucking mad, and the more beers I drank, the
madder I got. I blamed him for all the shit that had been dumped on me.”

“Why him?” said Hjelm.

“He was a bank guy,” said Rudström clearly. “That’s what it was. Somebody said that he worked in a bank. Finally it drove me crazy.”

“He worked in town?”

“No, in some hole-in-the-wall town, I think. I’m not sure. He wasn’t from Växjö, I know that. I have no clue who he was. But he was a real ace at darts. I hope he wasn’t seriously injured.”

They exchanged glances, all four of them.

“It’s possible that he was injured worse than you might imagine,” said Hjelm. “But not in the way you mean.”

He pressed two hundred-krona bills into Rudström’s hand. The man now seemed to be totally immersed in the memory that he’d initially thought the booze had drowned out forever.

“My God, how I hit him,” he said. A couple of tears quietly ran down his steroid-scarred cheek. “My God.”

They were just about to leave when Kerstin Holm crouched down in front of him. “I have to ask you one thing, Anton,” she said. “Why did you want to hear ‘Misterioso’ while you beat him up?”

He looked her right in the eye. “It was such a fucking great tune. But now I’ve forgotten how it goes.”

She patted his arm lightly. “But he probably hasn’t.”

They were so distracted that they ended up at what they thought was an outdoor café until they got their hamburgers with a big M on the wrapper. They found themselves sitting on the McDonald’s terrace on the big pedestrian street in Växjö. It was afternoon.

“Misterioso,”
said Kerstin. “It’s a play on words, typical Monk. There’s an inaudible
mist
in the title. Behind the
mystery
, the
mysterium
, there’s a
mist
. When you say the word, you don’t hear the
mist
. It’s hidden by the more pronounced
mystery
. And yet it’s there and has an effect. It’s in the tune too. The mystery is immediately apparent, intangible, of course, and yet physically manifest. The mist inside is harder to distinguish. But it’s there in the mist that we go astray.”

Hjelm had gone astray. There was something somewhere that he had overlooked, something that had passed him by and yet had been there the whole time; okay, he thought, something altogether physically manifest. Someone had said something. It was driving him crazy.

“Have you thought of anything?” asked Chavez, biting into his Quarter Pounder.

“It’s there, just below the surface,” said Hjelm.

“I know how you feel,” said Chavez, chewing. “It’s like
Fawlty Towers
, right? A difficult guest is served the wrong dish three times. Basil’s wife, what’s her name? Sybil. She finally serves the wrong dish on purpose. Basil says between clenched teeth, ‘I know how she feels.’ ”

“What does that have to do with any of this?” said Holm in surprise.

“Not a damned thing. Just making conversation, as I’m told it’s called.”

A bank
, thought Hjelm, digging through his own memory bank. He came up with nothing, not even a statement of account.

“What do we do if you can’t come up with anything?” said Chavez. “Line up every banker in Småland in a row and let Mr. Serious Alcoholic take a look at them, one after the other?”

“He must have been treated for the teeth that were knocked out, and the broken arm, if that’s what it was,” said Holm.

“This whole thing is still such a long shot.” Chavez smacked his lips. “Not something we can present to Hultin, at any rate. He beat up a guy listening to Hackzell’s ‘Misterioso’—but it’s a big leap from there to actually
having
the tape.”

“There’s a connection,” Hjelm said doggedly.

“Okay,” said Chavez. “Does your connection have anything to do with Igor and Igor? It almost has to. The cassette is the only link between the beating in the spring of ’91 in a restaurant in Växjö and the ex-Soviet bullets in the upper-class walls in Stockholm. And the path of the tape from the restaurant to the villa in Saltsjöbaden follows the same route as Igor and Igor. They took the tape from Hackzell, after all, as partial payment for the Estonian vodka on February fifteenth.”

Hjelm shook his head. The whole thing was unclear. Misterioso.

“Let’s start from the point of view of the banker who was beaten up,” said Kerstin Holm. “According to Hackzell, right after the beating, as he’s spitting out teeth, he said, ‘He was totally justified.’ About the guy who pounded him! Strange, don’t you think? The years pass, the wounds heal, but at the same time the accumulation of distrust, insight, confusion, powerlessness grows—”

“Wrede!” shouted Hjelm, jumping to his feet.