The Return of the Dancing Master (22 page)

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Authors: Henning Mankell

BOOK: The Return of the Dancing Master
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Dear Mother and Father!
 
I'm sorry I haven't written for so long, but we have been constantly on the move and are now not far from Berlin. You have no need to worry. The war is a sad tale of suffering and sacrifice, but I've come through comparatively unscathed and been very lucky. I've seen a lot of my former comrades killed, but I have never lost heart. I do wonder, however, why more young Swedes, and older ones for that matter, have not rallied to the German flag. Do people in my homeland fail to see what is at stake? Have they not realized that the Russians are going to subjugate everyone who fails to resist? Ah well, I shall not try you with my thoughts and my anger, but I am sure, dear Mother and Father, that you understand what I mean. You didn't prevent me from enlisting, and you, Father, said that you would have done the same if you'd been younger and didn't have a lame leg. I must close now, but at least you know I am still of this world and continuing the struggle. I often dream about Kalmar. How are Karin and Nils? How are Aunt Anna's roses faring? I think about all sorts of things in quiet moments, but there are not so many of them.
 
Your loving son,
August Molin.
Now promoted to Unterscharfuhrer.
Molin's motives were now clearer than ever. He'd been encouraged by his parents to fight for Hitler against Bolshevism. When he went to Norway, it was not as some kind of adventurer. He had set himself a mission. Towards the end of 1944, possibly in connection with the wounds he had suffered, he had been promoted. What was an “Unterscharführer”? What was the Swedish equivalent? Was there an equivalent?
Lindman read on. The entries became less frequent and shorter, but Molin stayed in Germany until the end of the war. He is in Berlin as the city falls, street by street. He describes how he saw a Russian tank at close range for the first time. He notes that on several occasions he was close to “falling into the clutches of the Russians, in which case I would have had to rely on the mercy of the good Lord.” No Swedish names crop up by now, nor are there any Danish or Norwegian ones. He is now the only Swede among German comrades. The last wartime entry in his diary is dated April 30.
April 30. I'm fighting for my life now, fighting to escape alive from this living hell. All is lost. Swapped my uniform for clothes taken from a dead German civilian. That's more or less the same as deserting, but everything is crumbling on all sides now. I shall try to escape over a bridge tonight. Then we will just have to see what happens.
It is not clear what happened next, but Molin did survive and did manage to get back to Sweden. A year passes before he makes the next entry in his diary. He is in Kalmar by then. His mother died on April 8, 1946. He writes on the day of her funeral: “I shall miss Mother. She was a good woman. The funeral was beautiful. Father fought to hold back his tears, but managed to keep composed. I think about the war all the time. Shells whistle past my ears even when I'm sailing in Kalmar Bay.”
Lindman read on. The entries became shorter and sparser still. He notes that he has gotten married. That his wife gives birth to children. But he writes nothing about changing his name. Nor is there any mention of the music shop in Stockholm. One day in July 1955, for no apparent reason, he starts a poem. He crosses it out, but it is still possible to read the words:
Morning sun in Kalmar Bay
The birds are twittering in the trees
Today will be a lovely day
Perhaps he couldn't think of anything to rhyme with “trees,” Lindman thought. “Bees” would have worked. Or “breeze.” He took a pen from his pocket and wrote in a notepad: “With white clouds scudding in the breeze.” It would have been a very bad poem. Perhaps Molin had enough sense to realize the limits of his poetic gifts.
Molin—he is now Molin—moves to Alingsas, and then to Boras. Ten days in Scotland produce an unexpected outburst of writing. To find anything like it Lindman would have to go back to the first months in Germany when Molin's optimism was intact.
After Scotland everything reverts to normal. He seldom takes up his pen, and then merely notes individual events, with no personal comment.
Lindman became more attentive as he came to the end of the diary. Before that, Molin had noted when he did his last day's work at the police station, and when he moved to Harjedalen. One particular entry aroused Lindman's curiosity:
March 12, 1993. Greeting card from the old portrait painter Wetterstedt, congratulating me on my birthday.
On May 2, 1999, he makes his last entry:
May 2, 1999. +7 degrees. My master jigsaw puzzle maker Castro in Barcelona has died. Letter from his widow. I realize now that he must have had a hard time these last few years. An incurable kidney disease.
That is all. The diary is far from full. The book Molin bought in a stationer's in Oslo in June 1942 was with him for the rest of his life but is incomplete. If a diary can ever be finished. When he started writing he was young, a convinced Nazi, on his way from Norway to Germany and the war. He eats ice cream and is embarrassed when Norwegian girls look him in the eye. Fifty-seven years later he writes about the death of a jigsaw puzzle maker in Barcelona. Six months later, he is dead himself.
Lindman closed the book. It was almost pitch-black outside. Is the solution in this diary or elsewhere? he asked himself. I can't answer that question. I don't know what he left out, only what he wrote. But I now know a few things about Molin that I didn't know before. He was a Nazi, he fought for Hitler's Germany in World War II. He also traveled to Scotland and went for a lot of long walks with somebody he called “M.”
Lindman packed the letters, photographs, and the diary into the raincoat again. He left the house the same way he'd come in, through the window. Just before opening the car door he paused. A vague feeling of sorrow had come over him. About the life Herbert Molin had led. But he realized that some of the sorrow was directed at himself. He was thirty-seven years old, childless, and was carrying an illness that could send him to his grave before he reached forty.
He drove back to Sveg. There was little traffic on the roads. Shortly before Linsell he was overtaken by a police car heading for Sveg, then another. What had occurred the previous night seemed strangely distant and unreal. Yet it was less than twenty-four hours since he'd made the horrific discovery. Molin had made no mention of Abraham Andersson in his diary. Nor Elsa Berggren. His two wives and two children he mentions only in passing, briefly and factually.
The lobby was deserted when he entered the hotel. He leaned over the desk and took his key. When he came up to his room he examined his suitcase. Nobody had touched it. He must have imagined it.
He went down to the dining room shortly after seven. Larsson still hadn't called. The girl emerged from the swinging doors and smiled as she produced the menu.
“I saw you'd taken your key,” she said. Then she became serious. “I hear something else has happened. That another old man has been killed somewhere near Glöte.”
“That's right.”
“This is awful. What's going on?”
She shook her head in resignation, not expecting an answer, and gave him the menu.
“We've changed today,” she said. “I wouldn't recommend the veal cutlets.”
Lindman chose elk fillet with béarnaise sauce and boiled potatoes. He had just finished eating when the girl came through the swinging doors and announced that he was wanted on the telephone. He went up the steps to the lobby. It was Larsson.
“I'll be staying overnight at the hotel,” he said.
“How's it going?”
“Nothing tangible to go on.”
“The dogs?”
“They haven't found a thing. I expect to be there in an hour. Will you keep me company while I have supper?”
Lindman said he would.
At least I have something I can give him, he thought when the call was finished. I have no idea what the relationship was between Molin and Andersson, but I can open a door for Larsson even so. In Berggren's house there was a Nazi uniform. And Molin had been very careful to withhold his past from the world. There is a possibility, Lindman thought, that the uniform in Berggren's wardrobe belonged to Molin. Even if he had exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes to escape from the burning ruins of Berlin.
Chapter Fifteen
L
arsson was exhausted by the time he arrived at the hotel. Even so, he laughed happily as he sat down at the dining room table. The kitchen would be closing shortly. The girl who alternated between the dining room and the reception desk was setting tables for breakfast. There was only one other guest, a man at a table next to the wall. Lindman supposed he must be one of the test drivers, although he looked rather old to be test driving cars in hostile conditions.
“When I was younger, I often used to go out for meals,” Larsson said, by way of explanation for his laughter. “Now it only happens when I'm forced to spend the night away from home. When there's some violent crime or something similarly unpleasant to figure out.”
As he ate, he told Lindman what had happened during the day. What he had to say could be summed up in a single word. Nothing.
“We're marking time,” he said. “We can find no tracks. Nobody saw anything, although we've traced four or five people who drove past that evening. What Rundström and I are wondering now is if there really is a link between Andersson and Molin. And if there is, what could it be?”
When he'd finished eating he ordered a pot of tea. Lindman ordered coffee. Then he told Larsson about his visit to Berggren's, how he'd broken into her house, and his discovery of the diary in Molin's shed. He moved his coffee cup to one side and set out the letters, the photographs, and the diary for Larsson to see.
“You've really overstepped your mark,” Larsson said, clearly irritated. “I thought we'd agreed that you wouldn't continue poking around.”
“I can only say I'm sorry.”
“What do you think would have happened if Berggren had caught you?”
Lindman had no answer to that.
“It mustn't happen again,” Larsson said after a while. “But it's better if we don't say anything to Rundström about your evening visit to the lady in question. He tends to be a bit touchy about things like that. He wants everything to go by the book. And as you have already seen, he is not that pleased when outsiders start interfering in his investigations. I say ‘his investigations' because he insists on regarding cases of violent crime as his own personal business.”
“Johansson might tell him about it? Even though he said he would keep it to himself?”
Larsson shook his head. “Erik's not all that fond of Rundström,” he said. “One should never underestimate antagonisms between individuals and also between provinces. Being junior to big brother Jämtland doesn't go down well in Harjedalen. That kind of problem afflicts the police force as well.”
He poured himself another cup of tea from the pot, and examined the photographs.
“What you have uncovered makes for a very mysterious story,” he said. “So Molin belonged to the Nazi party and went to fight for Hitler. Unterscharführer? What on earth was that? Was he mixed up with the Gestapo? Concentration camps? What was it they put over the entrance to Auschwitz?
‘Arbeit macht frei.'
Horrific stuff.”
“I don't know much about Nazism,” Lindman said. “but I imagine that if you were a Hitler supporter you didn't shout it from the rooftops. Molin changed his name. This might tell us why. He was covering his tracks.”
Larsson had asked for his bill, and paid it. He took out a pen and wrote “Herbert Molin” on the back of it.
“I think better when I write things down,” he said. “August Mattson-Herzén becomes Herbert Molin. You've spoken of his fear. It could be that he was scared that something in his past would catch up with him. You talked to his daughter, I suppose?”
“She said nothing about her father having been a Nazi. But then I didn't ask her about that, of course.”
“It's like having a criminal in the family. You'd rather not talk about them.”
“That was my thinking. Do you wonder if Andersson was another person with a past?”
“Let's see what we find in his house,” Larsson said, writing down “Abraham Andersson.” “The forensic unit were going to take a few hours' rest, then continue through the night.”
Larsson drew a line with two arrows between the two names, Andersson and Molin. Then he drew a swastika followed by a question mark next to Andersson's name.
“We'll have a serious chat with Mrs. Berggren first thing tomorrow morning,” he said, writing her name and drawing an arrow between it and the other two. Then he crumpled the bill up and put it in the ashtray.
“We?”
“We can say that you are in attendance as my extremely private assistant, unauthorized.” Larsson laughed aloud, then turned serious again. “We have two horrific murders to deal with,” he said. “I couldn't care less about Rundström. Nor do I care whether everything goes by the book. I want you to be there. Two people listen better than one.”
They left the dining room. The man was still sitting at his table. They parted in the lobby, agreeing to meet the next morning at 7:30.
 
 
That night Lindman slept like a log. When he woke he realized he'd been dreaming about his father. They had been looking for each other in the woods. When the young Stefan finally found him in his dream, he had felt boundlessly relieved and happy.
Larsson had slept badly, however. He'd got up as early as 4 A.M. and by the time he wished Lindman good morning in the lobby, he'd already been to Andersson's house. Nothing had changed. They had no clues to point to who had killed Andersson, and perhaps also Molin.

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