The neighbours, yes.
But there was one person enjoying herself even more than Anja. It was Mikaela, their eldest daughter. She was sixteen years old and the most beautiful thing in the whole world. But one morning, she had come down to breakfast in their roomy Tuscan kitchen and no longer been a virgin.
Arto would never be able to put his finger on exactly how he had known, but it was undeniable. She was glowing. Her entire being was shining. He wondered whether he should take on the role of disgraced father, heading out into the bushes with a shotgun and blasting to smithereens every single teenage salami hanging from every single teenage body in the neighbourhood. But things didn’t turn out that way.
All he did was smile a smile that was probably as blissful as Mikaela’s; her own vanished the moment she caught sight of its own depraved mirror image. She ran out among the vines, thoroughly ashamed of herself. He followed her, shouting that it was all OK so long as she made sure the boy used a condom. Four white heads, each a different height from the ground, stood there staring at him as he shouted P-words at the vines. Even little Lina knew about P-words and she knew that they weren’t good, but she didn’t know exactly what P-words were. Porn words, the second eldest daughter explained, a glimmer of the forbidden in her eyes. Oh, said Lina, not knowing what porn words were either.
Eventually, Mikaela crept out from the vines with flame-red cheeks, like a Colorado potato beetle.
When Anja crawled out of bed and came out onto the terrace, her husband and daughter were hugging one another in the mild morning sunshine, flanked by four white heads, each a different height from the ground. Her herbs were wrapping the scene in a heaven-scented blanket, and birdsong was echoing between the olive trees. It was an image she would never forget. Paradise really did exist.
But for Arto, it was still just a shell. Anja could see that and so she secretly turned on the mobile phone. They would ring sooner or later, that much she knew.
And just a few days later, they did.
The Söderstedt family was in Florence at the time. It was their second visit of their stay in Tuscany. The first time they went, Arto had lost the plot in Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel in the San Lorenzo Church and simply refused to leave. After half an hour in its handful of square metres, the rest of the family had had enough and headed outside. They had gone for a hearty lunch in a popular restaurant down on Lungarno Acciaiuoli, over by the Arno River, and then wandered back to Piazza di Signoria and Il Duomo and returned, after three hours, to the Medici Chapel. Their father had still been standing in the tiny space, his eyes fixed on its green-and-white marble walls.
He was convinced that he had suddenly, as though in a vision, understood all the secrets of the Renaissance. The restrained excess always present just beneath the surface of Michelangelo’s unfailingly precise handiwork was hypnotic. Everything was possible – and yet all was not done. There was a distance there which wasn’t aesthetic, but rather showed that now, right now, in late-fifteenth-century Florence, everything, absolutely everything was possible. They had to drag him away with force.
And so the family had returned for a slightly more normal visit. Acting more like a proper tourist family from barbarian Scandinavia.
They were sitting, looking out over the city, at a round table in a restaurant on Piazzale Michelangelo, on the other side of the Arno. Viewed from above, they would have looked like a perfectly circular pearl necklace.
That was when the phone started ringing.
Arto Söderstedt, who had been excused from driving, had ordered a bottle of wine and didn’t react. The phone kept on ringing, and he continued not reacting. His family was looking at him with growing scepticism.
‘Is Daddy dead?’ little Lina asked, worrying that she might have said a P-word.
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Anja. ‘It doesn’t make much of a difference.’
Finally he spoke, his voice robotic. ‘That can’t possibly be my phone. My phone is switched off. Switched-off phones don’t ring.’
They waited. Time stood still.
Later, with a high-calibre pistol jammed into his mouth, Arto Söderstedt would look back at that moment and think: Then, right then, anything had been possible. Then, just then, it would have been possible to resist, and not just aesthetically. Right then, you could’ve resisted answering the phone. Everything could have stayed as it was, in a state of paradise which you, you rogue, foolishly failed to set any worth on. You had the chance to resist and you turned it down. It had been a terrible decision.
He answered: ‘Arto by Arno.’
And with that, he was silent for exactly fourteen minutes.
‘What about now?’ little Lina asked. ‘Is Daddy dead now?’
Those were the only words spoken. Anja tipped the bottle of wine slightly, trying to assess just how much her husband had drunk. Deciding that it couldn’t have been much more than a glass, she drank the rest of the bottle herself. It took exactly fourteen minutes. When he hung up, she said, perhaps not all that clearly: ‘I’m afraid I can’t drive home.’
To which Arto replied, with crystal-clear logic: ‘We’ve got to find a fax machine.’
The family trundled off to a nearby luxury hotel, where he explained that he was a policeman and that he would like to receive a fax. The porter would long regret his readiness to help.
Söderstedt phoned Hultin on his mobile and told him the number for the fax machine. Soon after, sixty-five sheets of paper came tumbling out. The porter thought about ink cartridges and engaged phone lines, but maintained the expression of friendly indulgence he had been taught to wear. Once all of the sheets were gathered together, he was handed, to his surprise, one hundred thousand lire.
‘Could I have a receipt for that?’ asked Arto Söderstedt.
Having written his first ever tip receipt, the porter said goodbye to the strangest family he had ever met. Quite how it had happened, he didn’t know, but he was one hundred thousand lire richer.
Milan was a big city in a completely different way to Florence. Everything was noisy. Arto Söderstedt weaved around in his big family car, always managing to return to the exact same place: a stinking refuse-disposal plant with flickering flames that reached ten metres up into the sky. No matter which way he turned the map, he couldn’t understand how this damned refuse plant ended up as the absolute centre of the city.
Milan was, after all, a city which really did have a centre. It had been built in concentric circles around the majestic, almost grotesque cathedral, which Söderstedt eventually drove past. He chugged around like an exhaust-fume terrorist and, after some shilly-shallying, managed to find a parking space less than five or so kilometres from the police station on Corso Monforte.
That was where he was headed.
After a walk which was better suited to the name ‘city orientation’, he made his way in through the entrance – and, in doing so, entered the fifties. The place was a time machine. Somehow, he had stepped into a worm hole and been flung back four decades. (It was, without doubt, the 1950s he found himself in.) Austere-looking men in white shirts and narrow black ties; women in dresses and high-heeled shoes; rows of desks where the main tools were pens and paper. And rubber stamps, of course. Stamps, stamps, stamps. Not a single computer as far as the eye could see.
He went over to a woman sitting at one of the desks and asked: ‘Commissioner Italo Marconi?’
Without looking up, the woman pointed to a closed door thirty or so metres away. As he walked over to it, he counted the number of desks he passed. He was on the verge of falling asleep on his feet. It was like counting sheep.