Paul Hjelm chuckled. ‘Story of my life,’ he said.
They were silent for a moment. The distance between them wasn’t especially big. There were no watertight doors keeping them apart. It was all leaking through. No, it wasn’t possible to understand someone else completely. But what about yourself?
So what, as Miles Davis was playing.
The image in each of their minds was, at least, the same. Hultin’s whiteboard. First, five names. At the bottom, the two who had fled the Ghiottone and Odessa together with Magda in August 1997. Above, three upper-case names in red: Magda Kouzmin, Magda Sheinkman, Elena Basenow. Three names, one woman. Alongside it, an e-fit image put together by Arto Söderstedt and Ernst Herschel. Arto had, in the strictest confidence, told them he suspected Herschel would find it easier to describe her vagina than he did her face, but they managed to put a picture together regardless. A picture of a face and nothing else. They had shown it to Adib Tamir too, and he had confirmed it. That was what she looked like, the bitch who cut Hamid in two.
Arto Söderstedt was fine. He was missing four teeth, wearing peculiar-looking braces and only able to sip Vin Santo through a straw. He was also talking quite strangely. But otherwise, he seemed happier than ever.
It looked doubtful he would ever come home again.
Next to the e-fit of Magda were four photographs, or rather three more e-fits and one proper photograph. They still had just one of the other Erinyes on film, and that was the woman with the mobile phone in Gdynia. Two were the e-fits that Jadwiga from the M/S Stena Europe had composed, and the third had been put together by a salesman from a superstore in Bromma to which Jorge, with great finesse, had managed to trace the red-and-purple-striped rope. The salesman could remember selling it to a woman dressed in black. He had assumed she was an Eastern European working girl and started hitting on her. She had paid in the form of 120 kronor and a kick to the groin. That was why he remembered her so well, and she was none of the four they knew of. That meant she was likely one of those who had taken part in the hangings in Skansen and Södra Begravningsplatsen. In Palazzo Riguardo too, in all probability.
Suddenly, the kick to the groin seemed almost gentle. Practically a caress.
There they hung in any case, five sharp female faces with a slight Slavic look to them.
All unidentified apart from Magda Kouzmin.
Europe was now on the hunt for them, and it was all their fault.
The A-Unit’s fault.
Neither Paul nor Kerstin were quite sure it was a good thing.
This was a case where plenty of guilty parties had been identified but not a single one had been arrested. Time had somehow set itself right, though; it had caught up with itself. And Jan-Olov Hultin looked fit as a fiddle. Not a stroke in sight. No black hole in the space-time continuum. A newly found sense of clairvoyance, perhaps, but they could live with that. Even Hultin.
They had finally had a response from the phone company in Ukraine. The phone from Odenplan had, on a number of occasions, made calls to two different numbers in Milan. Sometimes they had been to Palazzo Riguardo, presumably threatening calls, and sometimes to a nearby hotel room, where it wasn’t entirely implausible to imagine a couple of the Erinyes sitting and waiting, mapping out di Spinelli’s entire life. Aside from that, a large number of calls to and from Slagsta. Nothing else of interest.
‘Should we go in then?’ Paul Hjelm asked. ‘Should we go in and ruin Harald Sheinkman’s life just as he’s starting to get back on his feet?’
It was their job.
They both looked up at the beautiful house on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö. Before them, they could see a man without a nose practically skipping up to the house, brushing the roses with his hands and breathing in the scents of the garden through the hole he had in the place of a nose, before reaching its handsome front door and saying to himself: ‘To think that Pappa did so well when I did so badly. But now, now my life’s wounds will heal. As soon as I’m reunited with Pappa, who I loved when we lived in Berlin, who comforted me every night in the terrible Buchenwald. Then I’ll return to Odessa and take Magda from that awful orphanage where everyone becomes an addict or a whore, and we’ll move here to beautiful Sweden, and finally become a proper family again.’
Just a few seconds later, he was dead.
Should Anton Eriksson really be allowed to ruin his own child’s life too? Posthumously?
‘Like hell,’ said Kerstin, doing up her seat belt.
‘What about the truth?’ Paul asked, doing the same.
‘Enough’s enough.’
Paul Hjelm laughed, turned the ignition key and swung out onto Bofinksvägen.
Anton Eriksson could remain the man he had spent half his life believing he was. Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman.
The Nobel Prize candidate.
Hopefully he had, somehow, reconciled with his falsified life before he died.
Paul Hjelm accelerated and turned up the volume.
It was how they felt. Exactly how.
Kind of Blue.
39
AND THEN THE thing he had only dreamt of happened.
She came to visit him. ‘A ray of sunshine,’ as Anja said later that evening.
She just turned up. Arto was sitting on the veranda, slurping Vin Santo through a straw and enjoying life, and Anja went to open the door.
She came out onto the veranda and said: ‘It’s your colleague from the Italian police.’
Could it be Marconi? he wondered. They had already said goodbye.
He turned round and there she was.
She looked just like she had in Weimar. Slightly nervous and clutching a little handbag tightly in her hands.
‘Herr Söderstadt,’ she said cautiously.
His jaw dropped. It really was her.
It was Magda Kouzmin.
It was Magda Sheinkman.
It was Elena Basedow.
He couldn’t help but laugh, only for a short, short moment.
She didn’t look so violently homicidal. Erinye from 9 until 5.
He asked her to sit down. She thanked him and did so. He didn’t know where to begin and apparently nor did she. They sat in silence instead, watching the children run around, their heads bobbing like chess pieces out there among the greenery. Five white-haired and now four black-haired heads. Their group of friends was slowly but surely growing.
‘I admire you,’ she said. ‘You’re living. I’m something else.’
‘My mother’s uncle murdered your grandfather,’ said Arto Söderstedt.
There were opening lines and then there were opening lines…
She turned to him and smiled.
‘I guessed he was a relative.’
‘He only died recently. I inherited his money. All this, it’s a false paradise. It’s your money. And many, many others’. I still don’t know whether I should tell the world that Pertti Lindrot, the war hero, was a real bastard. I don’t know – should I sacrifice my children’s happiness for that?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Pertti Lindrot?’
‘Yes. From Finland.’
‘The third man,’ she nodded. ‘We never managed to identify him. It was impossible. Eventually I found out that there was, at least, a picture of him and that Herschel had it in Weimar. I went there and slept with him and copied the photo. Right after that, he asked me to pick up the spitting image of a man I’d just seen in a sixty-year-old photo from the railway station. It was a bit odd.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Söderstedt. ‘He drank himself to death. Slowly but surely. That’s the redeeming part of his existence.’
‘Maybe,’ Magda Kouzmin said after a moment. ‘I made sure to check the birthmark on his neck, by the way.’
‘How did you get into the palace?’
‘Same way you did. One after another, nice and calmly. Just a few hours earlier. They had no idea. They were waiting for you, not for us. They’d been following you. They were on to you the entire time.’