Strindberg's Star (4 page)

“But did she have any injuries?”

“Yes, yes! There was like a hole above her eyes … it was …”

A flash from the camera; the freelance photographer had crouched down a few yards away. For the first time, the diver looked at the intern with definite interest, and a twitch appeared in the corner of his mouth.

“Hey … is this going in the paper?”

A
t the editorial office, the news director started to type the intern’s quote.

BREAKING NEWS:
GIRL RAPED, MURDERED IN MINE SHAFT THE DIVER’S OWN WORDS

“Y
ou can add ‘only in
Dalakuriren
,’” said the intern, because now he could see that the police were guiding the large diver into the forest.
The ambulance personnel followed after them with their stretchers empty.

T
hen came a period of contented waiting.
Dalakuriren
hadn’t only been first, it had also gotten furthest with the story.

The intern and the freelance photographer had set up camp next to the trunk of a pine, where they tried to huddle together to protect themselves from the evening chill. And now a number of other teams began to gather in the dark. Swedish Radio and TT were there; the evening papers, of course; and next to the floodlights, TV4 and state channel affiliates had set up their cameras and tripods. Now and then the reporters went up to the rescue commander next to the stinking hole in order to update their reports, but the information kept changing.

First it was one of the local sport diving clubs that was going to help remove the murdered person from the shaft. Then the matter was passed along to the recovery divers from the coast guard in Härnösand. But at seven thirty, some high-up official in Stockholm must have happened to turn on the TV, because suddenly a special group from the National Task Force was supposed to solve the problem. Even though the Stockholmers had ordered a helicopter, it was easily three hours before they were on the scene. At that point, it was already a little past eleven o’clock.

Up till then, all the media outlets had had to cite
Dalakuriren
and the intern’s short interview.
Dalakuriren
’s assistant editor-in-chief had placed a basket of celebratory pastries on the news director’s table.

Once the task force had arrived in their black combat suits, the scene was transformed. The rescue command from Falun had to move away from the shaft, there were new cordons, and heavy boxes made of reinforced plastic were lined up on the yellow grass next to the edge of the mine’s entry. The Stockholm divers checked their
oxygen tanks, and the TV cameras captured how fit bodies slid into rubber and neoprene.

The Falun police stood like spectators with their arms crossed as the first pair of divers started to lower themselves into the mine, and when they reemerged, there was no time for them to react before the National Task Force commander arranged his own improvised press conference. The journalists gathered in a flock around him under the floodlights. The freelance photographer held up the camera with his arms straight up, aimed it down, and got a picture of someone with close-cropped hair, whose face was furrowed and resolute.

“Okay, listen. Let’s get some things clear,” said the commander. “We understand that some of you from the media have started to issue reports before you even know what we’re dealing with.”

“Are we supposed to ask permission or something?” interrupted a reporter from the state channel, which had done live reports based on
Dalakuriren
’s information at 6:00, 7:30, and 9:00.

A guy from the big evening paper also became angry:

“What we’re dealing with? What do you mean what we’re dealing with? We’re dealing with a woman who was murdered way down in a mine shaft, and that’s all we’ve said. That’s what the guy who found her said.”

“Well, listen,” said the commander. “I don’t know how you all got that information. But let’s start from the beginning. For one thing, that’s no woman down there in the shaft.”

The journalists squirmed.

“Like I said, not a woman. It’s a man.”

The intern felt something cold trickle down his spine. Then he heard himself protesting: “But it was a girl! That’s what he said, the guy who found her.”

“I don’t know who
you’ve
been talking to,” the commander said curtly, “but the body down there, it’s a man. And that man has been dead for several days, maybe longer, maybe
much
longer. So this is what will happen. Before our divers bring up the body, it will be
wrapped, so that we can safeguard forensic evidence. You should all try to remember that none of us knows anything about
why
this man is dead. According to our divers, there’s nothing that points to a murder.”

“Is there anything that indicates it isn’t one, then?” ventured the intern. The commander’s jaw tightened, and it looked like he was planning to answer. But then he wrapped up instead:

“That’s all, thanks, and you guys should try to keep to the facts from now on. We’re going to move our cordon out into a circle of about two hundred yards, out of respect for any next of kin. So you can start packing up.”

But, despite the blockades, the next morning both of the country’s evening papers showed the picture: a man’s corpse being lifted out of a mine shaft, wrapped up to the chin in the task force’s body bag. His long hair framed a bloodless face, and the flash from the camera had illuminated the whitened strands into a wreath of light, like a halo. But what the buyers of this issue would presumably remember most was the deep notch that had been cut just above the bridge of the man’s nose like a third eye socket.

I
t had been a very quiet morning meeting at
Dalakuriren
’s long center table as they worked through the list of potential follow-ups and, more important, decided who would do the job.

No one had said anything about the mix-up with the girl; that kind of whispering took place around the paper’s coffee machines. Along with the whispers about how the intern from Stockholm would be allowed to continue shadowing the police investigation.

But it didn’t really matter who took care of the reports from now on, because by now the evening papers had flown in their teams, and
Dalakuriren
would soon be left behind.

E
rik Hall, the diver, lived in a summer cottage outside of Falun. From the road, the intern could glimpse the barred windows of the sunporch, but in order to get closer, he would have to pass a fence as high as his chest. And a weasel-like figure with a brown leather jacket was standing guard just inside the gate. It looked as though the Weasel was writing something on a piece of cardboard, printed letters in red marker:
PLEASE SHOW RESPECT! PRIVATE PROPERTY!
Then he wedged
the cardboard into the gate and ran back toward the porch, where a door opened up and closed behind his narrow back.

By the time the other media had found their way to Hall’s cottage, the exclusive story had already been sold. The diver wasn’t answering the telephone or letting any other journalist inside.

Instead they had to sit and brood outside the fence for an hour or so, until at last the Weasel came slinking out from the sunporch with his photographer on his heels. All the cameras flashed as they tried to get a picture of the diver’s shadow behind the windows, but no one had any luck.

On his way out through the fence, the Weasel waved happily at his competition and ran off toward his car; and just as he passed the intern he whispered the words “special issue.”

T
he new papers came out at four that same day. The exclusive interview with Erik Hall and the write-up of the murder made it onto the big evening paper’s newsbill, plus the front page and pages six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and the center spread.

The first page was almost coal-black with ink: a dark, pixelated photograph that depicted the shaky chalk marks at the bottom of the mine shaft. To be on the safe side, the quote in the picture had also been written out in plain text, both in Old Norse and in translation:

The headline on page six:

WELCOME TO HELL

Page seven:

NIFLHEIM—THE KINGDOM OF HEL

Page eight:

SACRIFICED IN A PAGAN RITUAL?

Nine:

NÁSTRÖNDU—THE HALL OF MURDERERS

And so on, and then a big lead-in to the introductory article:

The other evening paper was reasonably quick to respond and actually managed to produce a whole new thirty-six page supplement for the next morning.

RITUAL MURDER IN MINE

The bloody religion—the victims and rites of the Æsir faith

The most hard-hitting subject matter featured a survey of pagan churches around the country and their potential links to extreme-right and neo-Nazi groups.

That same morning, the TV4 sofa went nuts over the mythological angle, while the state channel’s morning program let two New Age ladies explain that the Æsir faith involved sacrificing only fruit, flowers, and bread nowadays, and anyway, they said, the correct name was
Forn Sed.
Then a professor of criminology came on and gave a warning about jumping to conclusions, making the point that most murders were committed by people close to the victim. Then came the weather.

At
Dalakuriren,
the mood had become rather subdued. They’d been the lead, but now they were spinning their wheels. Æsir murder? Was there even such an expression? Who knew anyone of the Æsir faith in Falun, or for that matter in Grycksbo or Bengtsheden?

The intern from Stockholm and the other reporters had called every contact they had at the Falun police to find out more about the investigation. But at the police station over on Kristinegatan Street they just pressed their lips together in anger over the unfortunate publication of that crazy verse and the words Niflheim and Náströndu.

The next morning, the state channel dropped its skeptical stance and joined the ranks of the tabloids. They had somehow managed to shake the diver Erik Hall out of that cottage, and they’d flown him down to Stockholm for a studio interview.

At Hall’s side on the red cushions of the morning show sofa sat a grayish academic named Don something … Titelman? The intern had to rewind the clip on his computer to be able to read the name displayed. Yes, Don Titelman, associate professor of history, Lund University.

But there didn’t seem to be anything new when Erik Hall once again told the story of his remarkable dive down into the mine, so the intern fast-forwarded through Titelman’s long-winded exposé, in which he seemed to want to trace the neo-Nazis’ fascination with Norse mythology back to the Thule Society and someone called Karl Maria Wiligut.

Just another boring expert, thought the intern, and he slunk disappointedly down the stairs to
Dalakuriren
’s morning meeting.

T
here was only one person Don Titelman had loved completely and unconditionally, and that was his grandmother, his
yidishe
Bubbe. She was the first person who had treated him seriously. And he remembered that he had felt chosen when, for the first time, she had turned to him as a confidant. He had been only eight years old then.

*

B
ubbe’s 1950s house, with its scent of mothballs, stuffy closets, and rotting seaweed, was Don’s memory of summer. Neglectful, his workaholic parents were in the habit of dumping him there in Båstad as early as the beginning of June and then reluctantly bringing him back to Stockholm again in September. He was usually at least two weeks late for the beginning of the school year.

The house had been in shabby shape. The plaster on the front had fallen off in large chunks, and her yard had slowly become covered in rotting fruit, which neither of them had the energy to pick. His excuse had been laziness, but for Bubbe it had been her legs, which couldn’t carry her anymore.

The last few summers, she couldn’t even manage to go up the house’s only staircase, and Don had had the whole top floor to himself.
Despite the dust and the boarded-up windows, it had been better to sleep there than downstairs, because during the night Bubbe had never found any peace.

He had listened to her monotonous ritual every night from the bedroom above the stairs. First those creaking steps on the parquet, then the heavy sigh that revealed that she had sunk down into the corduroy sofa. She would usually sit there for a while, and he knew she would lean forward and let her fingers run along the scars and pits on her calves. Then the sound when she once again got up, and then another creaking lap around the room, a sigh, and the squeak of the feathers as the sofa welcomed her for another bit of rest.