“That there is somebody not a thousand miles away from where you are who’s trying to tell you something.”
“Quite right. The question is: what? The dog is a message. A sort of bottle thrown into the sea with a message inside it. But what? To whom? Think about that, and get back to me. I’m going home to Östersund now.”
“It’s pretty remarkable.”
“I’ll say it’s pretty remarkable. And frightening. Now I’m convinced that what we’ve gotten to so far is just the tip of the iceberg.”
“And you still think you’re looking for the same murderer?’
“Yes, that’s certain. Keep in touch. And drive carefully!”
There was a crackling noise in the telephone, then it went dead. A car passed. Then another. I’m going home now, he thought. Emil Wetterstedt had nothing new to tell me. But he did confirm what I already knew. Molin was a Nazi who never reformed. One of the incurables.
He drove onto the bridge, intending to go back home to Borås, and before he reached the mainland, he had changed his mind.
Chapter Nineteen
He dreamed that he was walking through the forest to Molin’s house. The wind was blowing so hard that he could scarcely keep his balance. He had an axe in his hand and was frightened of something behind him. When he came to the house he stopped at the dog pen. The strong wind had dropped altogether, as if somebody had snipped an audio track in his dream. In the pen were two dogs, both hurling themselves in a frenzy at the wire mesh.
He gave a start and was jerked out of his dream. It wasn’t the dogs breaking through the wire mesh, but a woman standing in front of him, tapping him on the shoulder.
“We don’t like people to be asleep in here,” she said sternly. “This is a library, not a sunporch.”
“I’m very sorry.”
Lindman looked dozily around the reading room. An elderly man with a pointy mustache was reading Punch. He looked like a caricature of a British gentleman. He was glaring disapprovingly at Lindman. Lindman pulled towards him the book he had fallen asleep over, and checked his watch. 6:15. How long had he been asleep? Ten minutes, perhaps, surely no more. He shook his head, forced the dogs out of his mind, and pored over the book again.
He had made up his mind coming back over the bridge. He would make a nocturnal visit to Wetterstedt’s apartment. He couldn’t bear the thought of another night at the hotel, though. He would simply wait until night fell, then go into the apartment. Until then, all he could do was wait. He parked his car within walking distance of Lagmansgatan and found a hardware store, where he’d bought a screwdriver and the smallest jimmy he could find. Then he’d picked out a cheap pair of gloves at a men’s department store. He wandered around the town until he felt hungry, ate at a pizzeria, and read the local newspaper, the Barometer. After two cups of coffee he’d tried to make up his mind whether to go back to his car and sleep for an hour or two or to continue his walk. Then it occurred to him that he might do best by going to the local library. He’d asked for assistance, and in the section devoted to history he’d found what he was looking for. A fat volume on the history of German Nazism, and a thinner book on the Hitler period in Sweden. He soon discarded the big tome, but the smaller one had captured his attention.
It was lucidly written, and after less than an hour’s reading he realized something that he hadn’t grasped before. Something Wetterstedt had said, and maybe also Berggren: that in the 1930s and up to around 1943 or 1944, Nazism had been much more widespread in Sweden than most people nowadays were aware of. There had been various branches of Nazi parties that squabbled between themselves, but behind the men and women in the parades there had been a gray mass of anonymous people who had admired Hitler and would have liked nothing more than a German invasion and the establishment of a Nazi regime in Sweden. He found astonishing information about the government’s concessions to the Germans, and how exports of iron ore from Sweden had been crucial in enabling the German munitions industry to satisfy Hitler’s constant demand for more tanks and other war materials. He wondered what had happened to all that history when he was a schoolboy. What he vaguely remembered from his history classes was a very different picture: a Sweden that had succeeded — by means of extremely clever policies and by skillfully walking a tightrope — in staying out of the war. The Swedish government had remained strictly neutral and thus saved the country from being crushed by the German military machine. He’d heard nothing about groups of homegrown Nazis. What he was now discovering was an entirely different picture, one which explained Molin’s actions, his delight at crossing the border into Norway and looking forward to going on to Germany. He could envisage young Mattson-Herzén, his father and mother, and Wetterstedt and the gray mass of people hovering between the lines of the text, or in the blurred background of the photographs of demonstrations by Nazis in Swedish streets.
That was when he must have fallen asleep and started dreaming about the frenzied dogs.
The Punch man stood up and left the reading room. Two girls, heads almost touching, sat whispering and giggling. Lindman guessed that they probably came from the Middle East. That made him think about what he’d been reading: about how Uppsala students had protested against Jewish doctors who’d been persecuted in Germany and were seeking asylum in Sweden. They had been refused entry.
He went downstairs to the circulation desk. There was no sign of the woman who’d woken him up. He found a restroom, and washed his face in cold water. Then he returned to the reading room. The giggling girls had left. There was a newspaper lying on the table where they’d been sitting. He went to investigate what they’d been reading. It was in Arabic script. They’d left behind a faint perfume. It reminded him that he should call Elena. Then he sat down to read the last chapter: “Nazism in Sweden after the War.” He read about all the factions and various more or less clumsily organized attempts to establish a Swedish Nazi party that would carry real political weight. Behind all those small groups and local organizations that kept coming and going, changing their names and symbolically scratching out each other’s eyes, he could still sense the gray mass assembling at the blurred periphery. They had nothing to do with the little neo-Nazi boys with shaven heads. They were not the ones who robbed banks, murdered police officers, or beat up innocent immigrants. He was clear about the difference between them and the weirdos who demonstrated in the streets and shouted the praises of Karl XII.
He put the book to one side, and wondered where the boy who kept watch over Wetterstedt fitted in. Was there in fact some kind of organization that nobody knew about, where people like Molin, Berggren, and Wetterstedt could make propaganda for their views? A secret room where a new generation — to which the boy standing behind Wetterstedt’s chair belonged — could be admitted? He thought about what Wetterstedt had said about “papers winding up in the wrong hands.” The boy had reacted, and Wetterstedt had clammed up immediately.
He returned the books to their places on the shelves. It was dark when he left the library. He went to his car and called Elena. He couldn’t put it off any longer. She sounded pleased when she heard his voice, but also cautious.
“Where are you?” she said.