“A bag with something in it,” he said. “There must be one somewhere.”
“What kind of things in it?” wondered Blomstrand.
“I don’t know,” said Wallander. “Papers, money, clothes. Maybe a gun. I just don’t know.”
The search began. Various bags and cases were carried down to where Wallander was waiting on the ground floor. He blew the dust off a leather briefcase containing old photos and letters, most of them starting with phrases like Dearest Gunvor or My dear Herbert. Another, just as dusty and unearthed in the attic, was crammed with exotic starfish and seashells. But Wallander waited patiently. He knew there would be traces of Konovalenko somewhere, and hence also perhaps his unknown companion. While he was waiting, he spoke with his daughter and Bjork. News of what had happened that morning had spread all over the country. Wallander told his daughter he felt OK, and it was all over now. He would return home that night, and they could take the car and spend a few days in Copenhagen. He could tell by her voice she was not convinced he was well, or that it was all over. He thought afterward he had a daughter who could read him like a book. The conversation with Bjork came to an end when Wallander lost his temper and slammed down the receiver. That had never happened in all the years he had worked with Bjork. But Bjork had begun to question Wallander’s judgment because, without telling anybody, he had set out after Konovalenko on his own. Of course, Wallander could see there was a lot to be said for Bjork’s point of view. But what upset him was the fact that Bjork started going on about that now, when he was in the middle of a critical stage of the investigation. As far as Bjork was concerned, he regarded Wallander’s furious outburst as an unfortunate sign that he was still mentally disturbed. “We’ll have to keep an eye on Kurt,” Bjork told Martinson and Svedberg.
It was Blomstrand himself who finally found the right bag. Konovalenko had hidden it behind a stack of boots in a closet in the corridor between the kitchen and the dining room. It was a leather suitcase with a combination lock. Wallander wondered whether the lock might be booby-trapped. What would happen if they forced open the case? Blomstrand drove to Kalmar airport at high speed with it, and had it put through the x-ray machine. There was no indication it might blow up if anybody opened it. Wallander took a screwdriver and forced the lock. There was a number of papers in the case, tickets, several passports, and a large sum of money. There was also a small pistol, a Beretta. All the passports belonged to Konovalenko, and were issued in Sweden, Finland, and Poland. He had a different name in each passport. As a Finn he was called Konovalenko Makela, and as a Pole he had the German-sounding name of Hausmann. There were forty-seven thousand Swedish kronor and eleven thousand U.S. dollars in the case. But what interested Wallander most was whether the other documents could indicate who the unknown traveling companion might be. To his great disappointment and annoyance, most of the notes were written in a foreign language, which he thought must be Russian. He could not understand a word. They seemed to be consecutive memos since there were dates in the margin.
Wallander turned to Blomstrand.
“We need somebody who speaks Russian,” he said. “Somebody who can translate this on the spot.”
“We could try my wife,” said Blomstrand.
Wallander stared at him in surprise.
“She studied Russian,” Blomstrand went on. “She’s very interested in Russian culture. Especially nineteenth-century writers.”
Wallander closed the suitcase and tucked it under his arm.
“Let’s go see her,” he said. “She’d only get nervous if we brought her to this circus.”
Blomstrand lived in a row house north of Kalmar. His wife was an intelligent, straightforward woman, and Wallander took an immediate liking to her. While they were drinking coffee and eating sandwiches in the kitchen, she took the papers into her study and looked up a few words in the dictionary. It took her nearly an hour to translate the text and write it down. But then it was ready, and Wallander could read Konovalenko’s memos. It was like reading about his own experiences from a different point of view, he thought. Many details of what had happened now became clear. The main thing was that the answer to the question of who had been Konovalenko’s final and unknown companion, who had moreover managed to leave the yellow house without being seen, was quite different from what he had expected. South Africa had sent a substitute for Victor Mabasha. An African called Sikosi Tsiki. He had entered the country from Denmark. “His training is not perfect,” Konovalenko wrote, “but sufficient. And his ruthlessness and mental resilience are greater than those of Victor Mabasha.” Then Konovalenko referred to a man in South Africa by the name of Jan Kleyn. Wallander assumed he was an important go-between. There was no clue about the organization Wallander was now certain must be behind it all, and hence at the center of everything. He told Blomstrand what he had discovered.
“An African is in the process of leaving Sweden,” said Wallander. “He was in the yellow house this morning. Somebody must have seen him, somebody must have driven him someplace. He can’t have walked over the bridge. We can rule out the possibility he’s still on Oland. There is a possibility that he might have had his own car. But more important is the fact that he’s trying to leave Sweden. Where, we don’t know; just that he is. We have to stop him.”
“That won’t be easy,” said Blomstrand.
“Difficult, but not impossible,” said Wallander. “After all, there must be only a limited number of black men passing through Swedish border controls every day.”
Wallander thanked Blomstrand’s wife. They returned to the police station. An hour later an APB went out on the unknown African. At about the same time the police found a cab driver who had picked up an African that morning from a parking lot at the end of Hemmansvagen. It was after the car burned up and the bridge was blocked. Wallander assumed the African had first hidden outside the house somewhere for an hour or two. The cab driver took him to the center of Kalmar. Then he paid, got out, and disappeared. The cab driver could not give a description. The guy was tall, muscular, dressed in light-colored pants, white shirt, and dark jacket. That was about all he could say. He spoke English with the cab driver.
It was late afternoon by now. There was no more Wallander could do in Kalmar. Once they picked up the fleeing African, the last piece of the puzzle could be fitted in with all the others.
They offered to drive him to Ystad, but he declined. He wanted to be on his own. Shortly after five in the afternoon he said goodbye to Blomstrand, apologized for shamelessly taking over command for a few hours in the middle of the day, and left Kalmar.
He had studied a map and come to the conclusion that the shortest way home was via Vaxjo. The forest seemed eternal. Everywhere was the same mood of silent detachment he had experienced inside himself. He stopped in Nybro for a meal. Although he would have preferred to forget all that had happened to him, he forced himself to call Kalmar and find out if the African had been traced yet. The reply was negative. He got back in the car and kept on driving through the endless forest. He got as far as Vaxjo and hesitated for a moment whether to take the Almhult route or to go via Tingsryd. In the end he chose Tingsryd so that he could start driving southward right away.
It was when he had passed through Tingsryd and turned off toward Ronneby that a moose loomed up on the road. He had not noticed it in the gathering dusk. For one desperate moment, with the brakes screeching in his ears, he was convinced he had reacted too late. He would run straight into the enormous bull moose, and his safety belt was not even fastened. But all of a sudden the moose turned away, and without knowing how it happened, Wallander shot past and did not even touch it.