When Arto Söderstedt had left Italo Marconi’s office that day, he had had absolutely no intention of getting hold of strong climbing shoes and a thick jumper with reinforced elbows, one which provided plenty of grip – that was the kind of thing Viggo Norlander and Gunnar Nyberg got up to, not him.
But things were different now. Back in Leipzig, he had already bought some climbing shoes and a good, thick jumper with reinforced elbows.
And now he understood just how he had managed to throw Marco di Spinelli off balance. It was only partly his doing; his appearance had also played a certain role. He had turned up at the house of Hans von Heilberg – though he hadn’t been Hans von Heilberg for fifty years – and had presented him with his companions from the Pain Centre: first, in his own image, Pertti Lindrot; then, in Leonard Sheinkman’s image, Anton Eriksson. As they had looked at the time.
Of course he had been thrown off balance.
The two motives for revenge converged in Marco di Spinelli. As Hans von Heilberg, head of the Pain Centre in Weimar, he had murdered and degraded countless people. As Marco di Spinelli, leader of the Ghiottone crime syndicate in Milan, he had also murdered and degraded countless people.
He was a deeply unpleasant man.
The Erinyes themselves also united the two motives for revenge, that much was clear. But how? What they were lacking was a woman who had been struck by the evil of the Ghiottone not once but twice. First as Hans von Heilberg and then as Marco di Spinelli.
This woman must also have known that the old professor in Stockholm was not called Leonard Sheinkman, and that the Mafia boss in Milan was not called Marco di Spinelli.
In other words, the leader of the Erinyes was a Jewish-Ukrainian former prostitute with links to the research group in Weimar.
Arto Söderstedt sat still for a moment. He let it all sink in.
Then he nodded and pushed a disk into the laptop.
A disk from Odessa.
The Kouzmin file. Franz Kouzmin’s tragic life appeared on the screen and Söderstedt filled in the gaps himself.
Kouzmin, Franz. Born Franz Sheinkman to a Jewish home in Berlin, 17 January 1935. Concentration camp in Buchenwald from August 1940. Slave labour in the war industry. His mother was executed in November 1944. His father was moved to the Pain Centre in Weimar, where he died in 1945. The nine-year-old Franz was used as a test subject in medical experiments and his nose was sawn off in January 1945. A Ukrainian woman by the name of Elena Kouzmin took care of and later adopted him, taking him back to her home town: the war-torn Odessa. The family lived in misery. Franz grew up an adopted, Jewish, noseless urchin. Bullied mercilessly at school, he became an alcoholic young. In 1967, aged thirty-two, he married another alcoholic, and in 1969, they had a daughter. His wife died of alcohol-related throat cancer in 1971. In 1974, their daughter was placed in an orphanage.
At some point during the early eighties, Franz had pulled himself together and started searching for surviving relatives across Europe. He found his father’s name in the summer of 1981. Living in Sweden. He boarded the M/S Cosmopolit in August that same year and headed for Sweden to rekindle his relationship with his father – he probably had the ultimate aim of taking his daughter out of the orphanage. He could vaguely remember his father (judging by what his father had written in the diary) as a good figure from the far-flung past. At 18.25 on 4 September, the M/S Cosmopolit docked in Frihamnen in Stockholm. Franz came ashore and climbed into an illegal taxi driven by a Finn called Olli Peltonen. He drove him to Bofinksvägen in Tyresö. Franz knocked on the door of his father’s house. His father opened. They didn’t recognise one another. That wasn’t so strange – nearly forty years had passed since they last met. Beaming with joy, Franz stepped into his father’s home. The man he thought to be his father jammed a kitchen knife into his back. What must have passed through his mind in those last few moments of life is impossible to imagine.
Back in Odessa, his daughter had gone to his flat at the end of September. The place was empty. She reported his disappearance to the police. The last words about Franz Kouzmin had been made by his twelve-year-old daughter: ‘Dad had just stopped drinking. He’d been completely clean for a month. And really, really happy.’
That was where his file should have ended. It shouldn’t have been possible to say any more about the sad figure of Franz Kouzmin.
But there were still several pages to go.
‘Save Kouzmin?’ ‘Yes.’
There was another Kouzmin. A second file had accompanied the other.
Magda Kouzmin.
His daughter.
Kouzmin, Magda. Born in Odessa to Franz Kouzmin, formerly Sheinkman, and Lizavjeta Kouzmin, née Sjatova, March 1969. Her mother died in 1971, she was in an orphanage from the age of five. Her father died when she was twelve. Early substance abuse. First arrest for prostitution in 1984, at the age of fifteen; some thirty or so more arrests after that, right up to 1997. Abused on twenty or so occasions, hospital treatment required. In 1987, she joined a brothel which provided party officials with prostitutes. Apparently highly appreciated by party officials. Witness statement: ‘Unbelievably good at her job. I’ve never known such pleasure.’ When the Wall came down, the brothel was taken over by the growing Ukrainian mafia which, in 1996, came under the control of an international organisation unknown to the Ukrainian authorities: the Ghiottone. Abused on seven occasions between February 1996 and August 1997. Reported missing along with two other prostitutes by her pimp, Artemij Tolkatjenko, in August 1997. Tolkatjenko moved to Manchester in 1998, and was found murdered near the Old Trafford stadium on 13 March 1999. Magda Kouzmin’s fate was unknown.
Magda. Named after her grandmother, Leonard Sheinkman’s wife.
Magda. Received a phone call from Lublin while she was in Odenplan metro station in Stockholm.
Magda. Leader of the Erinyes.
Magda. Leonard Sheinkman’s grandchild.
In February 1996, Magda’s brothel had been taken over by the Ghiottone. The time following this had clearly been a much more hellish time than before. Seven instances of abuse reported to the police meant at least twenty in reality. By August 1997, she had had enough. It couldn’t go on any longer. She fled along with two of her colleagues. She was twenty-eight years old and almost destitute. She had two options: die or turn a new page.
She chose to turn a new page – but without forgetting the preceding side. On the contrary, she allowed it to shape her entire future. It became her driving force during her detox and training. Her two former colleagues were by her side the whole time. They trained, deliberately, for an entire year. And then came the time for revenge. They set out on the hunt for their old tormentor, Artemij Tolkatjenko, the Ghiottone pimp from Odessa. He had moved to England by that point, presumably – like Nikos Voultsos a year later – in order to take over another group of prostitutes. They murdered him. Maybe they had even rescued others that first time, recruiting them as new colleagues.
Something had happened. Opportunities were arising. They could see just how much suffering went on within the prostitution business across Europe. They realised they could actually do something about it. They become goddesses of revenge. They became Erinyes.
So why, even that very first time, had they used the execution method from Weimar on their victims? Had Magda Kouzmin already understood the connection between the Ghiottone and the Pain Centre?
Did she already know about Marco di Spinelli?
Something else must have happened between her fleeing in August 1997 and the first murder in 1999. She had found out what took place in the Pain Centre in Weimar; she had adopted its methods. How had she found out about it? Had she already linked it to what had happened to her father? Probably not. She probably found that out later, perhaps even this year. When she went after the false Leonard Sheinkman.