‘Just wait until you get home and we’ll see if that’s true,’ Sara Svenhagen said violently.
‘I’m just quoting the article,’ Jorge Chavez replied, castrated. ‘It’s interesting that this kind of thinking is actually in circulation among prominent scientists. He even had examples from the animal kingdom. I thought stuff like this had been disproved. Not least by huge female spiders killing their tiny males right after mating.’
Kerstin Holm said: ‘Biologism is all about the idea of people being completely controlled by the laws of biology. Economism means that all human activity can be linked to some kind of profit. Two words we should learn.’
‘This is all a bit close to measuring skulls for my liking,’ said Hjelm. ‘State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala.’
‘The Erinyes,’ said Holm. ‘It’s interesting that the ancient Greeks made their most violent beings women.’
‘Meaning our violently inclined Erinyes can’t be women,’ Hultin said neutrally. ‘Rethink.’
They looked at him. He didn’t bat an eyelid.
‘Should we try to move on now?’ he said eventually. ‘So that at least some work gets done?’
Kerstin tried to go back to her earlier train of thought. Finally, it led to something:
‘Maybe their Stockholm attack also involved a renewal of a third kind. We’ve got no proof that any prostitutes have been recruited before – but it seems like that’s what happened here, that the Slagsta girls are being transported to their base in Ukraine. It might be the first time it’s happened, and in that case, it’s a matter of starting to liberate prostitutes. Though it might well have happened earlier – the various European authorities’ knowledge of fallen women isn’t always exemplary.’
‘What kind of girls are these Erinyes, really?’ asked Viggo Norlander. ‘I mean, it doesn’t just seem to be the woman from Odenplan who’s highly trained; there seem to be at least five of them?’
‘I still get the impression she’s the leader,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘She’s the one who was in contact with Slagsta, the one they called from the bus in Lublin. But yes, they all seem well trained…’
‘So at least five in Södra Begravningsplatsen,’ said Sara Svenhagen. ‘Plus at least one more on the bus, whoever it was who rang. The tour guide or something. Sounds like a pretty big organisation.’
‘And I think it’s getting bigger and bigger,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘But, Viggo, what kind of girls? It’s pretty serious violence. There must be hate and revenge involved. I think it’s a group of former prostitutes from Eastern Europe finally hitting back.’
‘With the maximum amount of pain possible,’ said Paul Hjelm.
‘Yeah. First they practically scare the life out of their victims with their ghostly creeping about. Then they use a near-scientific method to cause as much pain as they possibly can. It’s specialised, for sure.’
‘It’s certainly not normal,’ said Chavez.
‘No,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘It’s certainly not normal.’
24
PALACE. PALACE WAS the word.
You couldn’t call it anything else.
It was in the same area of the city as the cathedral, at the very centre of Milan’s concentric rings. Arto Söderstedt looked up at its sixteenth-century facade with the same fascination he always felt when faced with works of the Renaissance. That feeling of anything being possible, that man had just crawled up out of the dark ages; the feeling that the winds of change had been blowing in our direction, that we would simply get better and better and never have anything to fear.
Things had been roughly the same with the IT revolution. Though now it was in a parallel world that anything was possible. This reality had been exhausted, but cyber-reality was entirely unexplored. An enormous map of nothing but blank space. Columbus, Vespucci, Cortés, Vasco da Gama, Fernão de Magalhães; each of them had been resurrected to colonise a new world for the wealthy holders of power. With any luck, genocide in cyberspace would prove to be slightly less bloody.
But its art would hardly reach such heights.
The palace was even featured in his guidebook. It had been built between 1538 and 1564 by an architect called Chincagliera, on behalf of the aristocratic Perduto family. The fact it was called Palazzo Riguardo seemed slightly ironic to Söderstedt. ‘Riguardo’ meant ‘respect’.
The garden, a glimpse of which could be seen through the wrought-iron gates, was magnificent if cramped, as all private inner-city gardens tend to be. Söderstedt closed the guidebook and put it back in his briefcase before pressing a button on the wall. There was nothing to be heard, nothing to be seen. The only exception was a lone cat stalking through the greenery, miaowing furiously.
He waited. The sun had been high in the sky all day. The first week of May was over, and summer had been inching its way up the Appenine peninsula, finally reaching Milan. He continued to wait, watching as the reddening sun peeped through between a couple of roughcast stone buildings which looked completely black against the bright disc in the sky. It was evening in the big city. The traffic was still intense, but the air felt cleaner. It was lucky that the drive from the hills of Chianti to the smog of Milan took so long; his lungs had plenty of time to get used to the pollution.
He waited. He wasn’t going to give up.
Eventually, an abrupt voice said: ‘Nome?’
‘Arto Söderstedt, Europol.’
His debut. It felt absolutely fine.
‘Carta d’identità?’
He held up his Swedish police ID and his provisional Europol card. He didn’t quite know where to hold them – he couldn’t see a camera anywhere.
‘Avanti.’
The heavy iron gates swung silently open. He walked into the garden and up the stairs to the palazzo. Three sturdy-looking men in suits. Nothing new under the sun.
He was frisked twice by two of the men. The third emptied his briefcase and scrutinised the Pikachu figure dangling from his car keys. He squeezed it. It popped.
‘Pokémon,’ Artö Söderstedt said as one of the men squeezed his genitals. Thankfully, they didn’t pop.
The men said nothing. Söderstedt was utterly convinced he had ended up in some kind of low-budget film. The gates swinging back were the opening scenes, and he stepped right from reality into fiction. The film was under way.
During the rest of his time in Marco di Spinelli’s palazzo, he acted as though he was playing detective. He could hear his cool, drawling Philip Marlowe voice making comments about a variety of events. ‘It was one of those days when I would’ve rather chopped off my right arm than get out of bed.’
The three men – he avoided thinking of them as wise – took him down corridors awash with beauty. The distance between the men on the floor and the stucco ceilings above them seemed infinite – and not just in terms of time and space.
Eventually, they came to a majestic anteroom. It was higher than it was wide, but it was a miracle of well-restored wood carving. Behind a desk which, in all likelihood, was part of the original Perduto family furniture, a thin man in a dark drainpipe suit and fifties glasses was sitting. He was the spitting image of Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita. Clearly, he was di Spinelli’s private secretary. The man who knew everything that went on. He looked like a member of the increasingly endangered species which rendered computers obsolete.