“Because it’s bullshit,” the phone reverberated.
“What do you mean? There are a lot of aspects we haven’t thought of in here.”
“I was in the group of experts. I agree that it’s a coherent narrative. It works. But the story swallowed up the troublesome objections from the police officer in the group. The desire to create unity forced the most fundamental fact to the side.”
“And what’s that?”
“K’s professionalism.”
“What do you mean?”
“K isn’t trying to even out any positions; it’s not a process but rather an ice-cold series of exterminations. He leaves no red-hot evidence behind, only frostbitten remains. The corpses are ruins, not buildings.”
She didn’t say anything-she recognized the argument. She thanked him and hung up.
“He agrees with you,” she said.
Paul Hjelm, who had just been scrutinizing the delicate line between the pincers, gave a start. “What are you talking about?” he said, irritated.
“Nothing,” she said, and tried to press on through the material.
It didn’t really work. She called Larner again and got straight to the point. “Is it really professionalism in the second round?”
“As you have surely noticed”-his voice remained patient-“I have very little to say about the second round. I don’t understand it. It is the same professionalism, the exact same course of action. The victims are what has changed character.”
“But why?” she nearly shouted. “Why did he go from engineers and researchers to prostitutes and retired people?”
“Solve that, and you’ve solved the case,” Larner said calmly. “But is the distinction really that clear-cut? After all, you’ve recently had literary critics and diplomats and drug dealers die. Both kinds, one might say.”
“I’m sorry,” she said remorsefully. “It’s just so frustrating.”
“When you’ve worked on it for twenty years, you’ll see what frustration is.”
She hung up and reluctantly went on. The difficult thing was not to come up with hypotheses, to resist venting them and just get to work. To expand their horizons instead of narrowing them. To wait for the right moment.
They devoted the whole day to getting a reasonable overview. As well as the evening. Their tour of Manhattan would have to wait yet another day.
The next day they began to narrow their focus and take a fine-toothed comb to the thousand pages to find possible Swedish threads. Why had the killer gone to Sweden? Somewhere in these pages was the solution.
Hjelm took upon himself the investigation of the eleventh victim, the Norwegian, the nuclear physicist Atle Gundersen; there might be something there. He contacted UCLA and tried to find potential Swedish colleagues from the early 1980s; he contacted the family in Norway. He burned up half a day but drew a blank.
Holm turned to the descendant of Swedes in Commando Cool, Chris Anderson. She even called him. He sounded exhausted. He had been grilled many times and was sick and tired of it. Vietnam was far away now; weren’t they ever going to let him bury the memories that still haunted him at night? They had done terrible things, but it was war, and they had worked almost directly under the president, so what could they have done? No, he didn’t know exactly how the chain of command and the issuing of orders had worked; it should be in the reports. Yes, he had been close friends with Wayne Jennings, but they had drifted apart after the war. And now Anderson had no contact at all with the land of his forefathers-he didn’t even talk to his parents.
They searched on, intensely. As soon as any tiny, burning question appeared, Larner threw his patiently smothering blanket over the flame. He seemed to have thought of everything after all. They began to reevaluate his work. The lack of hypotheses and ideas seemed more and more to be because there were none to find. He had kept a cool head and hadn’t let wild hypotheses take over in the absence of sensible ones.
Moving forward without having any clues to follow was the most difficult balancing act in their line of work.
And yet they felt-and they talked a lot about it, talked too much in general, were on their way to becoming friends instead of lovers-that all they needed was one small, crucial piece for the whole puzzle to become coherent; they felt frustratingly close without having the slightest reason for such a feeling.
“There’s something we’ve missed,” Paul said one evening in the hotel restaurant. By now they had no thoughts of placing their bodies anywhere but at the FBI building, in the taxi, or in the hotel. It was becoming a routine. He kept acceptable amounts of contact with Cilla and his family in Sweden; at first, before he knew how it was going to go with him and Kerstin, he hadn’t felt very motivated to call-something had held him back. But as they became more and more like pure police officers, his uneasiness fell away, and his conversations with Cilla felt completely normal. He missed her sometimes-when there was time.
“What do you mean ‘missed’?” Kerstin said, biting into a braised filet of cod. “We miss things all the time. The more we find, the more we miss.”
Paul watched her sip her wine. Had he gotten so close to her that she had stopped being beautiful? He contemplated her larynx as the wine ran down. No, he hadn’t. But perhaps his lust had found an alternative route that hadn’t been on his map earlier. He was treading upon virgin territory-and the intractability of fucking metaphorical language.
“I always have the feeling that we don’t need to know more,” he said.
“Then what are we doing here?”
“Looking for the little surge of impulse that runs through it all and brings it together.”
“You romantic.” She smiled.
Had he seen that smile so often that it had stopped being captivating? A ridiculous thought.
They stopped counting the days, simply swam like two fish in an aquarium. One early morning, Larner appeared in the door. He was worked up, and with his service weapon in place under his armpit.
“Are you tired of this?” he called, exhilarated.
Four square eyes looked at him skeptically.
“What do you say to some real police work? Want to be foreign observers at a raid on a drug den?”
They exchanged a glance. Maybe that was what they needed.
“Okay,” Larner said as they half-ran through the corridor behind Jerry Schonbauer; the floor shook substantially, as though his steps had transplanted the fault line from the west coast to the east. “We’re on loan to ATF. They don’t really know what do with us now that you guys are working on K. The rest of the state’s serial killers are in other hands. We’re going to a crack house in Harlem-you’ll have a chance to stare American reality in the eye. Come along.”
They were out on the street. Big black American cars drove up, and Hjelm and Holm threw themselves into one of them alongside Larner and Schonbauer, all four in the backseat. The two agents pulled on jackets with luminous yellow letters on the back: ATF, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Like a funeral procession out to prevent the gravesite from being stolen, the caravan forced its way through the New York traffic and reached northern Manhattan, the hopeless neighborhoods, the sacrificed and buried neighborhoods. The building facades became more and more dilapidated; finally it looked like a bombed-out city. Shadows of Dresden. The faces in the streets became darker and darker, till finally they were only black. It was a terrible but logical transformation, a gradual transition from the white downtown to the black Harlem. There was no possibility of trying to explain it away. That was just how it was.
The cars stopped in a well-mannered line. Equally well-mannered lines of ATF-clad experts poured out with weapons drawn, then ran through a ragged, burnt garden, ravaging what plants were there.