The Return of the Dancing Master (19 page)

He sat in the car for ages, trying to understand. In the end, when his urge to drink something very strong got the better of him, he started the engine and drove away.

He continued towards Malmö. After a while he could see on his right a long bridge linking Sweden to Denmark. He drove into the city and had no difficulty finding the car rental company. When he paid the bill, he was surprised at how much they'd charged him. He said nothing, of course, and paid in cash, though he'd left them his credit card number when he rented the car. He hoped the documentation recording that Fernando Hereira had rented a car in Sweden would disappear into the depths of some archive.

Back on the street, he found that there was a cold wind blowing in from the sea, but it had stopped raining. He set off towards the city center and stopped at a hotel in a side street off the first square he came to. No sooner had he entered his room than he stripped down and took a shower. While he was living in the forest he'd forced himself to take a dip in the freezing lake once a week and try to rinse all the filth away. Now, as he stood under his shower in Malmö, he thought that at last he could wash off all the ingrown dirt.

Afterwards, he wrapped himself in a bath towel and sat down with the last of the bottles in his backpack. Freedom! He took three large swigs, and felt the warmth spreading over his body. The previous night he'd drunk too much. That had annoyed him. Tonight the only thing he needed to worry about was getting to the airport the next day.

He stretched out on the bed. He was thinking more clearly now that he had brandy flowing through his veins. What had happened was rapidly becoming a memory. His aim now was to get home to his workshop. His whole life revolved around that. The cramped workshop behind the house in Avenida Corrientes was the cathedral he attended every morning. And his family, of course. His children had left the nest. His daughter Dolores had moved to Montevideo and would soon give him his first grandchild. Then there was Rakel, who was still studying to be a doctor. And Marcus, the restless dreamer of the family, who longed to become a poet, although he was earning his living at the moment as a researcher for a radical program on Argentinean television. He loved his wife, Maria, and his children. Nevertheless, it was his workshop that was the mainspring of his life. He would soon be back there. August Mattson-Herzén was dead. Now there was a chance that all the events that had been haunting him since 1945 might leave him in peace.

He stayed on the bed for a while. Occasionally he reached out for the brandy bottle. Every time he took a swig he made a silent toast to Hollner. But for him, nothing of this would have happened. But for Hollner, he would never have been able to find out who killed his father. He stood up and tipped the contents of his backpack onto the floor. He bent down and picked up the diary he'd been keeping for the forty-three days he'd spent in Sweden, one page for every day. In fact he had gotten as far as page 45. He'd started writing on the flight to Frankfurt, and then on the flight to Copenhagen. He went back to the bed, turned on the bedside lamp, and leafed through the pages. Here was the whole story. He'd written it thinking he might give it to his children, but they wouldn't get it until after his death. What he'd written was the history of his family. And he'd tried to explain why he'd done what he had done. He'd told his wife he was going on a journey to Europe to meet some furniture makers who could teach him something new. In fact, he had embarked on a journey into his past. In the diary he described it as a door that had to be closed.

Now, as he lay thumbing through what he'd written, he began to have doubts. His children might not understand why their father had made such a long journey to take the life of an old man who lived in seclusion in a remote forest.

He dropped the book on the floor and took another swig of brandy. That was the last one before he dressed and prepared to go out for a meal. He would have something to drink with his food. What was left in the bottle would see him through the night and the next day.

He was feeling drunk now. If he'd been at home in Buenos Aires, Maria would not have said anything, but would have looked accusingly at him. He didn't need to worry about that now. Tomorrow he'd be on his way home. This evening was for him alone, and his private thoughts.

 

 

He left the hotel at 6:30. The strong cold wind almost bowled him over. He had been thinking of going for a walk, but the weather forced him to abandon that idea. He looked around. Further down the street was a restaurant sign, swaying in the wind. He set off in that direction, but hesitated when he got there. There was a television set high in a corner showing an ice hockey match. He could hear the commentary from the street. Some men were sitting at a table, drinking beer, watching the game. He suspected the food wouldn't be especially good, but on the other hand, he couldn't face more of the cold.

He sat at an empty table. At the next table was a man staring in silence at his almost empty beer glass. The waitress came with a menu, and he ordered beef steak with béarnaise sauce and fries. And a bottle of wine. Red wine and brandy was what he drank. Never beer, never anything else at all.

“I hear that you speak English,” said the man with the beer glass.

Silberstein nodded. He hoped very much the man at the next table wouldn't start talking to him. He wanted to be at peace with his thoughts.

“Where do you come from?” the man said.

“Argentina,” Silberstein said.

The man looked at him, his eyes glassy. “
Entonces, debe hablar español,
” he said.

His pronunciation was almost perfect. Silberstein looked at him in surprise.

“I used to be a sailor,” the man said, still speaking Spanish. “I lived in South America for some years. That was a long time ago, but when you learn a language properly, it stays with you.”

Silberstein agreed.

“I can see you want to be left in peace,” the man said. “That suits me fine. So do I.”

He ordered another beer. Silberstein tasted his wine. He'd ordered the house wine. That was an error. But he didn't have the energy to send it back. All he was really interested in was staying drunk.

A loud roar filled the premises. Something had happened in the ice hockey match. Players dressed in blue and yellow embraced each other. The food arrived. To his surprise, it was good. He drank more wine. He felt calm now. All the tension had faded away, and was being replaced by a vast and liberating vacuum. Molin was dead. He had achieved what he had set out to do.

He'd finished eating when he glanced at the television screen. There was evidently a break in the match. A woman was reading the news. He almost dropped his glass when the dead man's face appeared on the screen. He couldn't understand what the woman said. He sat motionless, and could feel his heart pounding. For a moment, he halfexpected his own face to appear there as well. But the face that did appear was not his own, but another old man. A face he recognized.

He turned to the man at the next table, who seemed to be lost in thought.

“What are they saying on the news?” he said.

The man turned to the television and listened. “Two men have been murdered,” he said. “First one, and then another. Up in Norrland. One was a policeman, the other played the violin. They think they were killed by the same murderer.”

The picture on the screen disappeared, but he knew now that his eyes had not deceived him. The first man was Mattson-Herzén, or Molin, and the second one was the man he'd once seen visiting him. He'd also been murdered.

Silberstein put down his glass and tried to think straight.
The same murderer
. That wasn't true. He had killed the man who called himself Molin, but not the other man.

He sat quite still. The ice hockey match had started again.

T
he night of November 3, 1999, was one of the longest Stefan Lindman had ever endured. When dawn finally broke, faint light creeping over the wooded hills, it felt as though he were in a weightless vacuum. He'd stopped thinking long ago. Everything happening around him seemed surreal, a nightmare. A nightmare that began when he'd walked around the trees and found Andersson's body.

He had forced himself to feel for traces of a pulse, which he knew had stopped forever. The body was still warm—at any rate, rigor mortis had not yet set in. That could mean that whoever shot him was still in the vicinity. The light from Lindman's flashlight had shown where the shot blast had hit him, just over his heart. He'd almost fainted. It was a big hole. Andersson had been executed at close range, with a shotgun.

The dog had started howling as soon as Lindman tied it up. His first thought was that it might have found the scent of the killer, who could be very close. Lindman had raced back to it, scratching his face badly on tree branches. Somewhere along the way he'd also lost his cell phone, which had been in his shirt pocket. He'd taken the dog back to the house and called the emergency number. Lindman had mentioned Larsson's name, and from then on, the man on duty in Ostersund had asked no unnecessary questions. He'd asked if Lindman had a cell phone, was told he'd dropped it somewhere, and said he would call the number to help him find it. Now it was beginning to turn light; his telephone was still lost, and he had not heard it ringing. He had the feeling the whole time that the killer was close by. He'd crouched low as he ran to his car, and reversed into a garbage can as he turned to
drive to the main road and give directions to the first of the police cars. The man in Ostersund said they would be coming from Sveg.

The first to arrive was Johansson. He had a colleague with him, Sune Hodell. Lindman led them to Andersson's body, and both officers drew back in horror. Then time had dragged as they waited for daylight. They set up their base in Andersson's house. Johansson had been in constant telephone contact with Ostersund. At one point he'd come into the living room where Lindman was lying down on the sofa with a nosebleed, and announced that Larsson was on his way from Ostersund. The cars from Jamtland showed up soon after midnight, and were closely followed by the doctor. Johansson had gotten through to him in a hunting lodge north of Funasdalen. He'd contacted colleagues in the neighboring provinces of Halsingland and Dalarna to tell them what had happened. Once during the night Lindman had heard him talking to the Norwegian police in Rorös. The forensic team had rigged up a floodlight in the forest, but the investigation had been marking time, waiting for the light of morning.

 

 

At 4 A.M. Larsson and Lindman were alone in the kitchen.

“Rundström will be here as soon as it becomes light,” Larsson said. “Plus three dog handlers. We'll bring them in by helicopter, that's the easiest way. But he's bound to wonder what you're doing here. I need to have a good explanation to give him.”

“Not you,” Lindman said. “I need a good explanation myself.”

“Well, what is it?”

Lindman thought for a while before answering. “Maybe it was that I wanted to know if he'd remembered anything,” he said, eventually. “Concerning Molin.”

“And you stumbled upon a murder? Rundström will understand that, but he's going to think it odd even so.”

“I'm getting out of here very soon,” Lindman said.

“Okay. But not before we've talked through what happened here.”

Then one of Larsson's colleagues had appeared and reported that the Helsinborg police had informed Andersson's wife what had happened. Larsson went off to talk to somebody, possibly Mrs. Andersson, on one of the many cell phones that seemed to be ringing constantly. Lindman wondered how it had been possible to conduct a criminal investigation in the days before cell phones, and then he wondered about what mechanisms come into play when a murder investigation
gets under way. There are set routines that have to be followed, procedures where everybody knows exactly what to do. But beyond the routines, what happens then?

Lindman thought he could see what was going on inside Larsson's mind, and he was having similar thoughts himself. Or at least, trying to have. He was handicapped by the image that kept recurring in his mind's eye. Andersson tied to a tree trunk with a rope. The enormous entry wound. A blast or more than one blast from a shotgun at close range.

Andersson had been executed. An execution squad had appeared in the darkness, held a court martial, carried out the sentence, and then disappeared as discreetly as it had arrived. This is no straightforward little murder either, Lindman thought several times as the night progressed. But if it isn't, what is it? There must have been a link between Molin and Andersson. They form the base of a triangle. At its missing tip is somebody who shows up under cover of night, not once but twice, and kills two old men who, on the face of it, have nothing in common.

At that point all the doors slammed shut. This is the heart of the investigation, he thought. There is some invisible connection between the two men, a link that is so fundamental that somebody kills both of them. This is what Larsson is thinking about while he's going through the routines and waiting for the dawn that never seems to come. He's trying to see what is hidden under the stones.

Lindman stayed close to Larsson throughout the night. He followed him when they hurried back and forth between the scene of the crime and the house they had made their headquarters. He'd been surprised by how lightly Larsson seemed to be approaching his work. Despite the horrific image of a man messily shot and tied to a tree, he heard Larsson's cheerful laughter several times. There wasn't a trace of callousness or cynicism about him, just that liberating laughter that helped him to endure all the horror.