He came just up to my navel.
We stood there for a moment in the cool, fine rain. I held him. I had nothing to say.
And then he let go.
He headed straight for the muddy pool. And as he walked, he sank down into it, inch by inch. He said not a word, he simply walked and walked and sank and sank until there was nothing left. His little black head disappeared with a gurgle. The surface was oddly calm.
And I, I just stood there watching him sink. Not a finger did I lift to save him. Not a finger.
We could have fled. Magda had been nagging me: ‘Your friends are leaving, your colleagues are leaving, everyone we know is leaving. But us, we’re staying. Why? Why do you want to stay and wait for death? Think of Franz, at the very least.’ And I said: ‘It can’t be that bad. This is the twentieth century. We have cars, aeroplanes, the microscope. We have democracy and contraceptives and psychoanalysis and liberal arts. All we need to do is to survive the winter, hibernate as the storm passes by.’
And I had been right: the storm did pass. But once it was gone, there was nothing left. We had been sucked into it. All of us.
Behind it, a desolate landscape.
I killed my son and I killed my wife. My stubbornness killed them.
Let everything be silent.
Let me die.
20
HE SAT QUIETLY in bed. Something swept by in the darkness, taking him with it.
Perhaps it was an icy wind.
Perhaps it was the Erinyes.
His fingers touched the yellowed paper. He could feel the distance between the barely legible pencil letters. Ice was growing between them. Between the letters. It would never melt.
Paul Hjelm took off his new reading glasses and placed them on the bedside table, switched off the lamp and stared out into the darkness.
So, he thought, groping for Cilla’s warm body. His hand snaked beneath the blanket, coming to rest between her shoulder blades. She murmured. A sign of life.
So, that was how things could have been. Things could have turned out that way for him, too. If he had been born at the wrong time, to the wrong parents. His own thoughts could have been exactly like Leonard Sheinkman’s during those bleak February days in 1945. Disjointed, loose, but still with great and terrible repressed emotion.
Leonard Sheinkman had been convinced he was going to die back then, but he hadn’t. A few months later, the war had ended. He came out on the other side. He had been utterly, utterly empty, and now faced a choice: stay put and go under or move and make a new life for himself. Become someone else. He had chosen the latter, it had been a possibility for him. But what kind of end had he met? Being hung from a tree in the Jewish cemetery fifty-five years later? How was that possible? What had happened?
At that moment, Paul Hjelm was powerless to go through what he had read and draw any rational conclusions. He was much too moved. That was roughly what he had been expecting – and yet it was completely different. A different tone. Sorrow beyond all sorrow. As though it had been written from beyond the grave.
A weighty German-Swedish dictionary was resting on his stomach. In his left hand, he was holding the pages he had read; in his right, those he hadn’t. The piles were roughly equal in size, meaning he still had half left to read. He was looking forward to it – but he was also dreading it.
Paul Hjelm felt completely destroyed. As though he had been ransacked. In a way, that was what had happened.
Buchenwald, Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp, was seven kilometres outside Weimar in the former DDR. The city had been the European Capital of Culture just one year ago; the place in which Goethe had changed the face of world literature. In 1919, the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, had been founded there. In 1926, the Hitler Youth had been formed there. That same year, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the NSDAP, had held its first party meeting in Weimar’s national theatre. Then, between 1937 and 1945, two hundred and thirty-eight thousand people had been held prisoner in Buchenwald; there had been no gas chambers, but there had been a centre for ‘medical research’. In total, fifty-six thousand people had lost their lives in Buchenwald, practically within sight of Goethe’s Weimar. Between 1945 and 1950, it had also served as a Soviet detention camp for Germans. A further seventeen thousand people had died.
It was the cradle of the European paradox.
Paul Hjelm turned over to turn off the light.
Only then did he realise it was already out.
He fell asleep late that night.
21
HEARTS WAS BUT a memory. In the little stone house just outside the medieval village of Montefioralle deep within the hills of Chianti, there was no longer time for computer games.
There was Italian to be read.
It was hard work, going through Commissioner Italo Marconi’s investigation into the Milanese crime syndicate, Ghiottone. New information was also constantly arriving from Stockholm via email, fax and telephone.
Still, if you were a Europol officer, you were a Europol officer.
The aim of The Hague-based European law-enforcement organisation was to increase the effectiveness and cooperation of the competent member state authorities, particularly when it came to preventing and combating terrorism and the illegal trade of drugs, as well as other serious forms of international crime. Europol had been founded in order to make a significant contribution to the European Union’s efforts against organised crime.
‘OK,’ Söderstedt said to his computer as he sat on the porch with yet another glass of Vin Santo in his hand. ‘OK, that was a quote. I confess, computer. I didn’t even know I was a Europol officer when I went to Milan. So, yes: I’m sitting here, on holiday, citing police statutes with myself as the only witness. And you of course, computer.’
‘Who are you talking to?’ Anja shouted from inside the house. She had managed to nurture a rather decent-sized purple ruffles basil plant in the garden and seemed to be quite frisky in honour of the occasion. Now wasn’t the right moment to be unfaithful with a computer.
‘The computer,’ Arto shouted back.
‘Right,’ Anja shouted. ‘Come and see the little ones before they go to sleep.’
‘Where’s Mikaela?’ Arto shouted.
‘Where do you think?’ Anja shouted.
A lot of shouting went on in the Söderstedt family.
Arto immediately forgot her request to say goodnight to the little ones and went back to the computer. Technically speaking, it was the youngest member of the family. Though it was true, he never said goodnight to it.
Instead, without warning, it gave him the name of the old banker suspected of being the absolute ruler of the Ghiottone. His name was Marco di Spinelli.
There were plenty of pictures of this Marco di Spinelli. Di Spinelli was an old, thin, tough-looking man, not at all what you would expect of a Mafia boss. But then, he was also a northern Italian. Active in the separatist movement. Lega Nord and things like that.
There was even a picture of Marco di Spinelli and Nikos Voultsos together. They were certainly an ill-matched pair. The old, aristocratic silver fox dressed in a black polo neck and the coarse Greek in his pale pink suit, unbuttoned shirt, thick chest hair and fat gold chain around his neck. They were greeting one another outside a luxurious-looking restaurant in central Milan. Marco di Spinelli had his hand on Nikos Voultsos’s shoulder, and Voultsos’s smile seemed particularly subservient.