‘Hans von Heilberg,’ Söderstedt hissed.
‘Yes, yes,’ di Spinelli replied disinterestedly. ‘But Marconi was right that you did manage to surprise me on your first visit. I’d seen the film from Marconi’s office, of course, but you were sitting with your back to the camera so I hadn’t seen your face. It surprised me. You also seemed unusually mediocre. Then I realised it was a mask. You weren’t unusually mediocre, just mediocre. In a way, that was worse.’
‘And the Erinyes?’ Söderstedt panted.
‘Eastern European competition,’ di Spinelli replied with a shrug. ‘We have plenty of that these days, but it isn’t especially difficult for us to deal with. We’ll pick them up soon enough. They usually lose patience. But there’s one matter from earlier that we need to straighten out, Signor Sadestatt.’
‘How is it I’m so similar to Pertti Lindrot, the SS doctor from the Pain Centre in Weimar?’
‘Yes, how?’
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ Söderstedt said. ‘They’re dead, both of them. Pertti Lindrot devoted his life to drinking himself stupid. Anton Eriksson became a Jewish professor and met his end hanging upside down with a metal nail in his brain.’
‘Well, what do you know,’ said di Spinelli. ‘But you haven’t answered the question.’
‘I have no intention of doing so either,’ Söderstedt replied.
Suddenly, he felt a kind of shifting presence in the palace. He grinned.
‘In that case, it’s time to relive some old memories,’ Hans von Heilberg said, picking up a small box, not dissimilar to the kind you would keep expensive old jewellery in. ‘Of great value to the right collector,’ he said, removing a long, thin, sharp metal nail from the box. He bent it slightly, like a master fencer bends his rapier before each bout.
Then, suddenly, his three gorillas died.
The nail pinged back and Marco di Spinelli looked down at his three dead lumps of meat in surprise.
Something rushed by the door out towards the love nest. Like an illusion. It was completely empty back there. All he had noticed was a faint movement.
‘You move quickly, Magda,’ Söderstedt said into the nothingness.
The room remained silent and empty. Marco di Spinelli stared towards the mute darkness in the room where, for years, he had received prostitutes. Perhaps there was a glimmer of fear in his steely eyes. He grabbed one of his gorillas’ pistols and crept slowly over towards the love nest. He disappeared round the corner.
Söderstedt heard him.
He heard him die.
He didn’t scream, that would have been beneath him, but he gave out a wheeze, and that wheeze declared that he had lived too long.
Much too long.
He was dangling from the crystal chandelier in his exquisite office, hanging there like a modern work of art alongside Leonardo and Piero della Francesca’s masterpieces and the sixteenth-century tapestries. The faint moonlight was shining in through the window by which the Marquis of Perduto had composed his famous sonnets to Amelia, the girl he had met at the age of eight and never quite managed to forget.
Arto Söderstedt stood alongside him. The little pistol hung from his hand in the same way as Marco di Spinelli hung from his perfect chandelier. Both dangled. There was nothing for Söderstedt to aim his gun at. The room was empty. Elsewhere in the palace, the guards sat playing cards. They were blissfully unaware they were now unemployed.
He squatted down to look at Hans von Heilberg’s face. Just like the way in which the man himself had looked at the hundreds of victims whose dental gold had formed the basis of his financial activities in Milan. Activities which, in turn, laid the basis for his criminal empire.
Everything went hand in hand.
Hans von Heilberg’s shirt collar had been ripped back. A purple, rhombus-shaped birthmark shone dark against his pale skin.
From his temple, a long, sharp, stiff nail. The steely look in his eyes had been obliterated by the pain.
Time was slowly righting itself once more.
‘Are you there, Magda?’ Söderstedt asked, looking at di Spinelli’s glassy, lifeless eyes.
A faint shifting behind his back confirmed that she was.
They all were.
But when he turned round, he couldn’t see a soul.
He smiled.
And then he said, to the room, straight into the incomprehensible: ‘Thank you.’
38
IT WAS HIGH summer in Stockholm, the sun low in the unusually deep blue sky. And yet this time, it wasn’t at all as though an opera scenographer had tried to imitate nature.
It may not quite have been nature, but at least it was more like nature than before.
Than it had been a few weeks before.
Nature is the terribly awful truth.
The last time Paul Hjelm had been on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö, he had enjoyed a long, deep and open-hearted conversation with Leonard Sheinkman’s son. Though in actual fact, Leonard Sheinkman’s only son had died, right there, twenty years earlier. The man he had spoken to wasn’t Leonard Sheinkman’s son at all. He was the mass murderer and Nazi Anton Eriksson’s son. He was a Jewish man named Harald Sheinkman who now needed to be brought up to date about the whole sorry state of affairs.
About the fact his father was a Nazi, not a Jew.
About the fact his father was an executioner, not a victim.
About the fact his father hadn’t written the yellowed pages of that diary, but stolen it and used it to build a background for himself.
About the fact his father had managed to cause the worst pain imaginable by experimenting on guinea pig after guinea pig in a nightmare cellar in Weimar.
About the fact his father had murdered women and children.
How far did the limits of atonement really stretch?
The Pain Centre.
Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue streamed through the old Audi. That was precisely how Paul Hjelm felt.
Kind of Blue.
He said: ‘What is it you’re going through?’
Kerstin Holm turned to look at him.
Her own crisis had stopped short. The Erinyes were dominating her thoughts now. They didn’t leave room for much else.
They dealt out justice, their very own kind of justice. One which consisted of revenge – no more, no less. They took revenge on behalf of unavenged injustices.
So what exactly distinguished them from state-sanctioned death penalties?
She didn’t know. At times, they seemed almost fascistic. At times, rightful avengers. Sometimes, they were nothing more than terrorists. Sometimes, they were repressed but utterly vital mythical forces.
One thing was clear: the Erinyes would never become Eumenides. They would never allow themselves to be neutralised by the lightweight society in which they lived.
Because that was what life in the West was – lightweight: easily lived, easily digested, easily fucked. The unbearable lightness of being. An all-American Existence Light. Filled with chemical sweetener that killed infinitely more quickly than real sugar ever did.
That was the essence of her crisis. Her… metamorphosis. Even if the word did seem slightly grand. Pretentious, even – and if there was one thing no one wanted to be, it was pretentious. That was where everyone drew the line.
The thing she was searching for was the free zone, that place where the primitive forces had free rein to bubble away undisturbed. That bubble we never fail to pop before it gets too big. The one she could feel the virtual presence of every time she sang with the choir, allowing her voice to rise up towards the high vaulted ceilings and letting the choir’s tones surround her like a warm, comforting embrace. Religious? Mmm. But without a sense of the holy, our sense of the unholy also withers away. And we need to retain that. Otherwise we die.
That was roughly how it was. But how best to phrase it?
Maybe something like this:
‘It’s a bit tricky to explain. But don’t worry. I’m just brooding, causing myself grief.’