Red Wolf: A Novel (23 page)

The hall was dark. He crept in and closed the heavy door quietly behind him.

‘Thomas?’

Annika popped her head out of the bathroom, and took the toothbrush out of her mouth.

‘How did it go?’

He collapsed on the hall bench, feeling utterly empty.

‘It was a devil of a meeting,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s in shock.’

She vanished into the bathroom again; he heard water running, the sound of spitting. The sounds rolled into the hall and were amplified, growing until he had to put his hands over his ears.

She came out of the bathroom, in a pair of black tanga briefs, her large breasts swinging.

‘It may have been a devil of a meeting,’ she said, settling down next to him and putting her hand on the back of his neck, ‘but I don’t think this death has anything to do with the devil’s political views. I’m pretty sure you can all relax.’

He looked up at her, feeling her breast against his arm, realized he had tears in his eyes.

‘How can you know that?’

‘No one really knows anything at all yet,’ she said, ‘but there’s something bigger behind this than just the local council in Östhammar.’

She kissed him on the cheek, stroked the arm of his coat and stood up.

‘I’m buzzing like an idiot tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ve drunk two hundred litres of coffee this evening.’

He let out a deep sigh. ‘Me too,’ he said.

‘You smell of smoke and drink as well,’ she said over her shoulder as she went into the bedroom.

‘I hope so,’ he said, ‘because the taxpayer was paying.’

She gave a flat little laugh.

‘Are you coming?’ she called.

I can do this
, he thought.
I’m going to be able to do this
.

The news boards shrieked out their bright yellow messages about serial killers and police hunts all the way along Fleminggatan, standing out like sunflowers against an iron-grey lawn in the morning light. Annika saw them flash past from the window of the bus and felt the same strange effect as usual – a fascination at having put something into the world that goes on and lives its own life. Her articles could reach hundreds of thousands of people whom she would never meet, her words could generate emotions and reactions that she would never know about.

The journey to work passed quickly, accompanied by the screaming sunflowers.

In the newspaper’s lobby, a whole wall was papered each morning with that day’s newsbills, forming an entire enthusiastic choir.

Up in the newsroom she noted a change in temperature as she sailed out. Her lowered head was met with reassuringly warm glances where she usually encountered blocks of ice. She was back on track, dominating that day’s paper, someone to be reckoned with. All the old stuff was forgotten because things were happening again, nineteen hours to deadline and she had the picture byline on page six.

She turned her back on her colleagues’ ingratiating glances and pushed the glass door of her office shut behind her with a bang.

Göran Nilsson
, she thought, throwing off her outdoor clothes, frowning with tiredness. Born 1948 in Sattajärvi, emigrated, professional killer since 1969. No point looking him up on national databases. He would have been erased from the National Population Address Register decades ago.

She drummed her fingers in irritation as her computer slowly started up, then Googled ‘göran nilsson’ and got several hundred results.

There were so many Göran Nilssons in the world. She searched through the results and then turned instead to the Yellow Pages website to see how common the name really was, trying different districts at random. There were 73 in Blekinge alone, 55 in Borås, 205 in Stockholm and 46 in Norrbotten. Several thousand in the whole country, in other words.

She had to narrow the search somehow, add another word to the terms.

‘göran nilsson sattajärvi’. No results.

The letters
, she thought.
Maoism or left-wing groups
.

Bingo. Masses of hits, like Kristina
Nilsson
,
Mao
Zedong,
Göran
Andersson, all in the same result.

Then she tried to find pictures instead, ‘göran nilsson mao’.

Four results, small squares on the screen that she squinted at, leaning right forward. Two were logos for something she didn’t investigate further, one cultural revolutionary portrait of the Master himself on someone’s homepage, and finally a black-and-white picture of some young people in dated outfits. She looked closer, reading the description, clicked on the link and reached
a homepage that someone had set up about their youth in Uppsala. There was a caption that put the picture in context.

After the establishment of the fundamental 9 April Declaration, Mats Andersson, Fredrik Svensson, Hans Larsson and Göran Nilsson were prepared to bravely mobilize the masses in the name of the Master
.

She read the text twice, surprised at the slightly ridiculous religiosity it suggested. Then she stared at the young man on the far right, his shoulder hidden behind the man next to him, short hair, nondescript features, evidently not that tall. Dark eyes that were staring at a point to the left of the photographer.

She clicked back to the front page of the site and discovered that there were more photographs from Uppsala on the server, several from various demonstrations, but mostly from parties of one sort or another. She looked through all of them, but the dark young man named Göran Nilsson didn’t appear on any of the others.

Could it be him? Could he really have been an identifiable activist in the sixties, in which case he might well appear in various media from those days?

Archives like that were never available digitally; it was all envelopes of pictures and cuttings.

Her newspaper had the largest archive in the country. She grabbed the phone and asked the archivists to check if they had anything on a Göran Nilsson in Maoist groups at the end of the sixties. The woman who took her call showed little enthusiasm.

‘When do you need it?’

‘Yesterday,’ Annika said. ‘It’s urgent.’

‘When isn’t it?’

‘I’m sitting here waiting and can’t do anything until I hear from you.’

An almost inaudible sigh on the line. ‘I’ll do a quick check and see if I can find him in his own right. Reading through everything that was published on Maoism would take several weeks.’

Annika stood and looked out over the newsroom until she got an answer.

‘Sorry. No Göran Nilsson described as a Maoist. We’ve got a couple of hundred others though.’

‘Thanks for checking so quickly,’ Annika said.

What other archives were there from that period, in the places where Maoists were active? The university cities, she thought.
The Competitor
existed then, but there was no point in calling them.
Upsala Nya Tidning
? She had no contact there. Was there a newspaper in Lund?

She scratched her head in irritation.

What about Luleå?

She had picked up the phone and dialled the
Norrland News
reception before even realizing she was doing it.

‘Hans Blomberg was off sick yesterday, I don’t know if he’ll be in today,’ the receptionist said, ready to disconnect her.

Annika suddenly felt an immediate and inexplicable fear. Good God, surely nothing could have happened to him?

‘Why? Is it serious?’

The receptionist sighed, as if she were dealing with someone who was a bit slow. ‘Burned out, like everyone else. Personally I think they’re just lazy.’

Annika started. ‘You’re not serious?’ she said

‘Have you thought that all these people started getting burned out when we joined the EU? All the shit coming over our borders comes from the EU, people, toxins, burn-out. And to think I voted yes. Fooled, that’s what we were.’

‘Is Hans Blomberg often ill?’

‘He only works part time now, got a disability pension a while back. Often he’s not even here on the days he’s meant to be.’

Annika bit her lip. She had to get into the
Norrland News
archive as soon as possible.

‘Can you ask him to call me when he comes in?’ She left her name and number.

‘
If
he comes in,’ the receptionist said.

Göran Nilsson
, she thought as she hung up and stared at the young man on her computer screen.
Is that you, Göran?

The coffee machine had been repaired and the drinks were hotter than ever. She took her two cups into her room, letting the caffeine warm her brain.

Her eyes were stinging from lack of sleep. She had lain in bed with her eyes closed for hours while Thomas twisted and turned, moaning and scratching. The death of the local councillor had really shaken him.

She shook off her tiredness and carried on searching, typing in ‘Sattajärvi’, and reached a site about a building project at the end of the nineties.

There was a map. She leaned towards the screen to find the village and could just make out the tiny letters spelling out the names in the surrounding area: Roukuvaara, Ohtanajärvi, Kompeluslehto.

Not just another language
, she thought.
Another country, frozen solid, stretching up across the tundra above the Arctic Circle
.

She leaned back.

What was it like growing up north of the Arctic Circle in the fifties, in a family where the father was a religious leader in a strict and weird belief system?

Annika knew the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller
had found that a striking number of West German terrorists were the children of Protestant ministers. Miller saw a connection: the terrorist’s violence was a rebellion against a strict religious upbringing. The same could easily be true of Sweden and Læstadianism, the religious movement of Northern Sweden.

Annika rubbed her eyes. At that moment she caught sight of Berit hurrying past. She forced her mind to clear and pulled herself up out of her chair.

‘Have you got a minute?’ she called from her door.

Berit took off her hat and gloves and folded her scarf. ‘I’m thinking of going to lunch early today. Do you want to come?’

Annika logged out of the system, fished her purse out of her bag, and discovered she was out of lunch vouchers.

‘Do we have to go down to the canteen?’ she said, looking round, suspicious of the newfound warmth.

Berit hung up her coat on a hanger, brushing the garment’s shoulders with her hand.

‘We could go out if you like, but I did go past the Seven Rats, and it looked pretty empty. They’ve got stir-fried chicken with cashew nuts downstairs.’

Annika bit the nail of her left index finger, considering the offer, then nodded.

‘What have you been out doing?’ she asked as they went down the stairs.

‘Rumours about a government reshuffle,’ Berit said, puffing her hair where it had been squashed by her hat. ‘The Prime Minister hasn’t got long before the EU elections, and if he’s going to rearrange his ministers he has to do it now.’

‘And? Who’s likely to go this time?’ Annika said, picking up an orange plastic tray in the canteen.

‘Well, Björnlund, for a start,’ Berit said. ‘She’s the
worst Culture Minister we’ve ever had. She hasn’t come up with a single proposal in nine years. There are rumours that Christer Lundgren is on his way back from exile at Swedish Steel in Luleå.’ Berit opened a bottle of low-alcohol beer.

‘Really?’

‘Well, he never left the management committee, so a ministerial post was probably always in the pipeline.’

Annika nodded. Several years ago she had told Berit her thoughts about Christer Lundgren’s resignation, showing her the documents and travel receipts that proved that the Trade Minister hadn’t even been in Stockholm the night Josefin Liljeberg was killed. He had been meeting someone in Tallinn in Estonia, a meeting that was so controversial that he would rather accept a murder charge than reveal who he had met. There was only one explanation, Annika and Berit had agreed: Christer Lundgren was sacrificing himself for his party. Who he met in Tallinn and what they discussed could never be revealed. And she had told Karina Björnlund.

She had made the mistake of trying to get a comment from Christer Lundgren by telling the whole story to his press secretary. She never got a reply. Instead, Karina Björnlund had suddenly become a cabinet minister.

‘My stupid question paved the way for our Minister of Culture,’ Annika said.

‘Probably,’ Berit said.

‘Which means that it’s really my fault that Sweden’s got such useless cultural policies, doesn’t it?’

‘Quite right,’ Berit said. ‘What did you really want to see me about?’ Berit leaned back in her seat.

‘I’m after your past,’ Annika said. ‘What was the 9 April Declaration?’

Berit chewed a mouthful of food, a thoughtful look
in her eyes, then shook her head. ‘Nope, no idea. Why do you ask?’

Annika drank the last of her water.

‘I saw it in the caption to a picture on the net, some lads in the sixties who were going to mobilize the masses in the name of Chairman Mao.’

Berit stopped chewing and stared at her. ‘Sounds like the Uppsala Rebels.’ She put down her knife and fork, ran her tongue over her teeth, and nodded to herself. ‘Yes, that fits,’ she said. ‘They made some sort of declaration in the spring of sixty-eight. I can’t swear that it was April ninth, but they were certainly extremely active that spring.’

She laughed and shook her head, then picked up her knife and fork again and went on eating.

‘What?’ Annika said. ‘Tell me!’

Berit sighed and smiled. ‘I told you how they would phone and make threats to us at the
Vietnam Bulletin
?’ she said. ‘The Uppsala Rebels were proper little idiots. Every day they held marathon meetings, in various locations. They would start at one in the afternoon and carry on till long after midnight. A friend of mine went along once, said there was very little politics involved – he described it as more of a hallelujah orgy.’

‘A revivalist meeting?’

Berit took another mouthful, some water, and swallowed.

‘That’s what they reminded some people of, yes. Everyone who attended was a committed Maoist. They stood up one by one and bore witness to the way Mao’s thoughts had been like a spiritual atom bomb for them. After every speaker there was wild applause. Every now and then there’d be a break, and they’d have sandwiches and beer, then they’d carry on with a new round of personal statements.’