She looked embarrassed. “G is manicures; my manicurist’s name is Gunilla. PS means parents; we have a family dinner at four o’clock every Sunday. I have a large family.”
“PPP and FJ? How can you keep all these abbreviations straight?”
“PPP was a girls’ lunch on the sixth, with Paula, Petronella, and Priscilla, to be exact. FJ was a conference day at work, foreign journalism. Aren’t you about finished?”
“CR?” he persisted.
“Class reunion,” she said. “I’m going to see my old class from upper secondary.”
“S and Bro?” he said.
She looked like she’d been struck by lightning. “There’s nothing like that,” she said, trying to remain calm.
He elegantly returned the Filofax. “S on occasional evenings, Bro every Tuesday at various times,” he said with a chivalrous smile.
“You’ve got a screw loose.”
“Those entries were in there, in ink, so you had to go out and buy a whole new Filofax to replace the pages with S and Bro. What does S mean, and what does Bro mean?”
“You had no right to go through my things,” she said, close to tears. “I’ve lost my husband.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but actually I had every right. This is a murder case of enormous proportions. Talk to me now.”
She closed her eyes. And didn’t say anything.
“This apartment is yours,” he said quietly. “It was purchased two years ago, and you paid 9.2 million kronor cash. You also own an apartment in Paris that’s worth two million, a summer home on Dalarö worth 2.6 million, two cars worth 700,000, and all together you are worth 18.3 million kronor. You’re twenty-eight years old and you earn 31,000 kronor a month at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition, you get substantial expense allowances when you’re abroad. You come from a reasonably wealthy family, but none of them have the kind of money you do. Can you explain that? How did you explain it to Eric?”
She looked up. Her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying, yet.
“Eric accepted it without questions. My family is rich, I said, and he was satisfied with that. You should be, too. He was satisfied with anything that brought a little joy into this life. Well-invested money. Superior money. If you have a fortune, it works for you. Money is what earns money in this country now; people like you have to accept that, too.”
“I don’t,” said Söderstedt, without changing his tone.
“It’s best that you do!” she shouted.
“What do S and Bro mean?” he said.
“Bro means Bro!” she yelled. “Every Tuesday I met a man by the name of Herman in Bro. We fucked. Okay?”
“Did that bring joy into Eric’s life, too?”
“Stop it!” she cried. “Don’t you think I feel guilty enough about it? He knew what I was doing-he accepted it.”
“And S?”
She stared at him fiercely. Her body seemed to contract. Had he pressed too hard?
“That’s when I jog,” she said calmly, exhaling. “That’s my jogging session. I work so much that I have to schedule my jogging.”
“S as in ‘jogging’?”
“S as in ‘stretching.’ It takes longer to stretch than to jog.”
He looked at her with amusement. “You schedule stretching? And you want me to believe that?”
“Yes.”
“And the money?”
“Successful gambles in the stock market. It’s possible to earn money in Sweden again, thank God.”
“And it has nothing to do with shady Arab transactions?”
“No.”
“Excellent. Fifteen minutes ago you were placed under watch by the guard unit of the National Criminal Police. We are of the opinion that you are in mortal danger.”
She glared at the crafty Finland Swede, full of hate. “Protection or surveillance?” She maintained her calm.
“Take your pick,” said Arto Söderstedt, and took his leave of her.
It could have gone a little better, but he was satisfied.
Jorge Chavez had put one hundred cars on the shelf and was now concentrating on a single one. He was taking a bit of a chance. The nonexistent company’s name was Café Havreflarnet, which sounded harmless-it was named after a cookie-and was therefore an excellent front. It was supposed to be located on Fredsgatan in Sundbyberg, but there was no fucking Café Havreflarnet there, just a boring old Konsum grocery.
He pored with his usual intensity over the patent office’s business register and finally came upon the name of an authorized signatory, a Sten-Erik Bylund, who had been living on Råsundavägen in Stockholm when the business was established in 1955. The National Social Insurance Board showed that the firm had gone bankrupt, and Chavez was obliged to consult a large manual register and page through lists of bankrupt estates. Finally he found Café Havreflarnet and learned that it had gone bankrupt in 1986. The Volvo with the B license plate had been registered three years later, in 1989. So even then the practically nonexistent business had been the owner of the car. Taxes and insurance were paid up, but the money didn’t come from Café Havreflarnet.
He tracked down a current address for Sten-Erik Bylund in Rissne. Without further ado, he set out to meet force with force, but that tactic turned out to be inadequate, because the address belonged to a long-term-care institution, and Bylund was a seriously senile ninety-three-year-old. He didn’t give up; rather, he sat across from the snacking elderly man and watched him stick bananas in his armpits and pour blueberry soup over his bald skull. Perhaps the café was not a CIA front after all.
“Why did you register your Volvo station wagon under the name Café Havreflarnet, even though the business had gone bankrupt three years earlier? Who pays the bills? Where is the car?”
Sten-Erik Bylund bent toward him, as though he were about to tell him a state secret. “Nurse Gregs has wooden legs,” he said. “And my father was a strict old woman who liked a quickie or two on the go.”
“On the go?” Chavez said, fascinated. Could it be a code?
“Yes indeed. He ran like a bitch in heat among the mutts. Brother Kate’s breasts are great.”
Although he was still suffering from speed-blindness, Chavez was beginning to have his doubts, not least when Bylund stood up and exposed his genitals to an old woman, who only yawned loudly.
“It was different with my Alfons,” she said to her neighbor at the table. “He was well hung, let me tell you. A real hunk of beef just hanging there jiggling. Unfortunately, it just hung there jiggling.”
“Well, dearie,” her neighbor replied, “one time my Oliver and I were sitting there necking in the dark, and he reached it out to me. I said, ‘No thank you, dear, I don’t really feel like a smoke.’ But he could go on for hours and hours until a person was really tender, you know, dearie. Even though a person had seen bigger, if you know what I mean.”
Chavez’s mouth was hanging open.
As he left he heard the women tittering, “Wasn’t that the new doctor, darling? Why, he must be from Lebanon. The smaller the body, the bigger the member-that’s what they say down there in the tropics, you know.”
“I think it was Oliver. He visits me sometimes. For being dead, he’s kept his backside in very good shape, dearie.”
Paul Hjelm shivered. He’d crossed many borders in the past twenty-four hours, but the weather transition was the most awful. As he stood under an umbrella with police logos, he saw LinkCoop’s long row of warehouses standing out against the streaky perpetual-motion machine that was the rain. He understood what Nyberg had meant when he talked about fallen skyscrapers. A downtown skyscraper in Täby and a slum skyscraper in Frihamnen. Both had fallen over.
He passed the sentry box with his ID raised, then moved to the right along the building with its loading dock. Hell had many manifestations, he thought. He had been in a crack house in Harlem, in Lamar Jennings’s dismal Queens apartment, in a torture chamber in Kentucky: so alike, yet so different. And now this dismal, gray warehouse in Frihamnen, where the only upgrade that had been done in decades was the business logo, which glimmered and flashed in spectacularly spectral spectra. Here Eric Lindberger had had his hell, Benny Lundberg his, and Lamar Jennings his.