Lindman waited for him to go on, but nothing was said for a while. He thought about the name Hereira had mentioned, Höllner. Something critical must have happened when they met.
“Who was Höllner?”
“The messenger I’d been waiting for all my life. A man who happened to be in the same restaurant as me one night in Buenos Aires. At first, when I discovered that he was a German emigrant, I was afraid he was one of the many Nazis who hid themselves in Argentina. Then I discovered that he was like me. A man who hated Hitler.”
Hereira fell silent again. Lindman waited.
“When I think back, it all seems so simple,” he said eventually. “Höllner came from Berlin, like me. And Höllner’s father had been given massage treatment by my uncle from the middle of the 1930s. My uncle was indispensable to Goering, who was constantly in pain as a result of his morphine addiction and couldn’t tolerate any masseur but my uncle. That was one starting point. The other was Waldemar Lehmann. A man who’d tortured and murdered prisoners in various concentration camps. His brother had been almost as bad. He was hanged in the autumn of 1945, but Waldemar they did not catch. He disappeared in the chaos at the end of the war and couldn’t be traced. He was high on the list of war criminals headed by Bormann. They found Eichmann, but not Waldemar Lehmann. One of those looking for him was an English major called Stuckford. I don’t know why, but he was in Germany in 1945 and must have seen the horrors when they entered the concentration camps. He’d also been present when Josef Lehmann was hanged. Stuckford’s research revealed that a Swedish soldier had been one of Waldemar Lehmann’s henchmen towards the end of the war, and that, egged on by Lehmann, the Swede had murdered his dancing master.”
Hereira paused again. It was as if he needed to gather strength to tell his story to the end.
“Sometime long after the war Höllner and Stuckford met at a conference for people trying to trace war criminals. They talked about the missing Waldemar Lehmann. During the conversation Höllner heard about the murder of a dancing master in Berlin, and he also heard that the man responsible was a Swede called Mattson-Herzén. Another Nazi had passed the information to Stuckford while being interrogated, hoping for clemency in return. Höllner told me all this. He also said that Stuckford occasionally visited Buenos Aires.”
Lindman heard Hereira reach for the bottle and put it down again without drinking.
“The next time Stuckford was in Buenos Aires I met him at his hotel. I introduced myself and explained that I was the son of the dancing master. About a year after that meeting I got a letter from England. In it Stuckford wrote that the soldier who’d killed my father, Mattson-Herzén, had changed his name to Molin after the war and was still alive. I’ll never forget that letter. Now I knew who had murdered my father. A man who used to give us a friendly smile when he arrived for his lessons. Stuckford’s contacts were eventually able to trace Mattson-Herzén to these forests.”
He paused again. There is no more, Lindman thought. No more is needed. I’ve heard the story. Sitting in front of me is a man who has avenged the murder of his father. We were right in thinking that Molin’s murder had its origin in something that happened in a war that ended many years ago. It seemed to Lindman that Hereira had completed for him a puzzle that he’d been working on. There was an irony in the fact that Molin had also spent his old age solving puzzles, in the constant company of his fear.
“Have you understood what I’ve told you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any questions?”
“Not about that, but I would like to know why you moved the dog.”
Hereira didn’t understand the question. Lindman rephrased it. “You killed Molin’s dog. When Andersson was dead, you took his dog.”
“I wanted to tell you that you were wrong about what happened. You thought I had killed the other man as well.”
“Why should we know that we were wrong because of the dog?”
His reply was simple and convincing. “I was drunk when I made up my mind what to do. I still don’t understand why nobody saw me. I moved the dog to create confusion. Confusion in the way you were thinking. I still don’t know if I was successful.”
“We did start asking different questions.”
“Then I achieved my aim.”
“When you first came, did you live in a tent by the lake?”
“Yes.”
Lindman could hear that Hereira’s impatience had melted away. He was calm now. There were no more clinking noises from the bottle. Hereira stood up, the floor vibrated. He was behind Lindman’s chair now. The fear that had subsided now revived. Lindman remembered the fingers around his neck. This time he was tied up. If the man tried to strangle him, he wouldn’t be able to resist.
When Hereira next spoke his voice came from the left. The chair creaked.
“I thought it would die away,” the voice said. “All those terrible things that happened so many years ago. But the thoughts that were born in Hitler’s twisted mind are still alive. They have other names now, but they are the same thoughts, the same disgusting conviction that a whole people can be killed off if another people or race ordains it. The new technology, computers, the international networks, they all help these groups to cooperate. Everything’s in computers these days.” Lindman remembered that he’d heard more or less the same phrase from Veronica Molin. Everything’s in computers these days.
“They are still ruining lives,” the voice said. “They’ll go on cultivating their hatred. Hatred of people whose skin is a different color, who have different customs, different gods.”
Lindman realized that Hereira’s calm was skin-deep. He was close to the breaking point, a collapse that could result in his resorting to violence again. He killed Molin, Lindman thought, and he tried to strangle me. He knocked me out, and now I’m sitting here tied to a chair. Unless I’m attacked from behind I’m stronger than he is. I’m thirty-seven and he’s nearly seventy. He can’t let me go because in that case I’d arrest him. He knows that he’s captured a police officer. That’s the worst thing you can do, whether you’re in Sweden or Argentina. Lindman had no doubt that the man in this room with him could kill him if he wanted to. He’d just finished telling his story of what happened, he’d made a confession, so what options were open to him? Running away, nothing else. And in that case, what would he do with the police officer he’d captured?
I haven’t seen his face, Lindman thought. As long as I haven’t seen his face he can go away and leave me here. I must make sure he doesn’t take off this blindfold.
“Who was the man in the road who tried to shoot me?”
The man seemed impatient again.
“A young neo-Nazi. His name’s Magnus Holmström.”
“Is he Swedish?”
“Yes.”
“I thought this was a decent country. Without Nazis. Apart from the old ones from Hitler’s generation who aren’t dead yet. Who are still hiding away in their lairs.”
“There’s a new generation. Not many of them, but they do exist.”
“I’m not talking about the young men with shaven heads. I’m talking about the ones who dream in blood, plan genocide, see the world as a feudal empire ruled by white men.”