The Return of the Dancing Master (29 page)

“So you actually met Goering?”

“In Sweden and in Berlin as well. For some time in the interwar years he was married to a Swede by the name of Karin. I met him then. In May 1941 I was called by the German Legation in Stockholm. Goering wanted to have his portrait painted, and I'd been chosen to do it. That was a great honor. I'd painted Karin, and he'd been pleased with that. So I went to Berlin and did a portrait of him. He was very kind. On one occasion it was the intention that I should meet Hitler at some reception,
but something cropped up and got in the way. That is the biggest regret of my life. I was so close, but in fact I never got near enough to shake his hand.”

“Who's the woman?”

“My wife. Teresa. I painted her portrait the year we married, 1943. If you have eyes to see, you'll appreciate that the picture is full of love. We had ten years together. She died of an inflamed heart muscle. If that had happened today, she'd have survived.”

Wetterstedt signaled to the boy, who drew the curtain shut. They returned to the studio.

“Now you know who I am,” Wetterstedt said, having settled in the armchair again and had the blanket spread over his knees. The boy had resumed his position behind the old man.

“You must have had some reaction to the news that Herbert Molin was dead. A retired police officer, murdered in the forests of Härjedalen. You must have wondered what happened?”

“I thought it had to be the work of a madman, obviously. Perhaps one of the many criminals who enter Sweden and commit crimes they are never punished for.”

Lindman was getting impatient with the views that Wetterstedt kept expressing.

“It was no madman. The murder was carefully planned.”

“Then I really don't know.”

The answer came quickly and firmly. A little too quickly, Lindman thought. Too quickly and too firmly. He continued his line of questioning, cautiously.

“Something might have happened a long time in the past, something that took place during the war.”

“Such as?”

“That's what I'm asking.”

“Herbert Molin was a soldier. That's it. He would have told me if anything exceptional had happened. But he never did.”

“Did you meet often?”

“We haven't met at all for the last thirty years. We kept in touch through letters. He wrote letters, and I replied with postcards. I've never liked letters. Neither receiving them nor writing them.”

“Did he ever mention that he was scared?”

Wetterstedt drummed his fingers in irritation on his armrest.

“Of course he was scared. Just as I'm scared. Scared at what's happening to this country of ours.”

“But there wasn't anything else he was frightened of? Something that had to do with him personally?”

“What could that have been? He chose to conceal his political identity. I can understand that, but I don't think he was afraid of being exposed. He wasn't fearful of papers winding up in the wrong hands.”

The boy coughed and Wetterstedt shut up immediately. He's said too much, Lindman thought. The boy is his watcher.

“What papers are you referring to?”

Wetterstedt shook his head in vexation. “There are so many papers in the world nowadays,” he said, avoiding the question. Lindman waited for more, but nothing came. Wetterstedt started drumming his fingers on the armrest again.

“I'm an old man. Conversations tire me. I live in an extended twilight zone. I don't expect anything. I'd like you to leave now, and leave me in peace.”

The boy behind the chair grinned cheekily. It was clear to Lindman that most of the questions he had would be left unanswered. The audience Wetterstedt had granted him was at an end.

“Magnus will see you out,” Wetterstedt said. “You don't need to shake hands. I'm more frightened of bacteria than I am of people.”

The boy whose name was Magnus opened the front door. The thick layer of fog was still enveloping the landscape.

“How far is it to the sea?” Lindman said, as they walked to the car.

“That's not a question I'm required to answer, is it?”

Lindman stopped in his tracks. He could feel the anger rising inside him.

“I always thought that little Swedish Nazis had shaven heads and Doc Martens boots. I now realize they can look exactly like normal people. You, for example.”

The boy smiled. “Emil has taught me how to deal with provocation.”

“Just what are your fantasies? That there's a future for Nazism in Sweden? Are you going to hunt down every immigrant who sets foot in Sweden? That would mean kicking out several million Swedes. Nazism is dead; it died with Hitler. Just what do you think you're doing? Kissing an old man's ass? A man who had the doubtful privilege of shaking Goering by the hand? What do you think he can teach you?”

They had come to the car and the motorcycle. Lindman was so angry, he'd broken out into a sweat.

“What do you think he can teach you?” he asked again.

“Not to make the same mistake they made. Not to lose faith. Now get out.”

Lindman turned his car and drove away. In his rearview mirror he saw the boy watching him.

He drove slowly back to the bridge, thinking over what Wetterstedt had said. He could be dismissed as a political idiot. His views were not dangerous anymore. They were but vague memories of a terrible time that was history. He was an old man who'd chosen never to understand, just like Molin and Berggren. The boy Magnus was something else. He plainly believed that Nazi doctrines were still very much alive.

Lindman reached the bridge. He was about to cross it when his cell phone rang. He pulled onto the side, switched on his hazard lights, and answered.

“Giuseppe here. Are you back in Boras yet?”

Lindman wondered if he should say something about his meeting with Wetterstedt, but decided to say nothing for the time being.

“I'm almost there. The weather's been pretty awful.”

“I wanted to phone you to say that we've found the dog.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere we'd never have guessed.”

“Where?”

“Guess.”

Lindman tried to think. But he couldn't raise a thought.

“I don't know.”

“In Molin's dog pen.”

“Are you saying it was dead?”

“No, as lively as they come. Hungry, though.”

Larsson laughed merrily at the other end of the line. “Somebody takes Andersson's dog during the night, and our men on duty are so tired they don't notice anything. Then whoever was responsible for kidnapping this dog dumps the animal in Molin's pen. Of course, it wasn't tied to the line. What do you have to say about that?”

“That there is somebody not a thousand miles away from where you are who's trying to tell you something.”

“Quite right. The question is: what? The dog is a message. A sort of bottle thrown into the sea with a message inside it. But what? To whom? Think about that, and get back to me. I'm going home to Ostersund now.”

“It's pretty remarkable.”

“I'll say it's pretty remarkable. And frightening. Now I'm convinced that what we've gotten to so far is just the tip of the iceberg.”

“And you still think you're looking for the same murderer?'

“Yes, that's certain. Keep in touch. And drive carefully!”

There was a crackling noise in the telephone, then it went dead. A car passed. Then another. I'm going home now, he thought. Emil Wetterstedt had nothing new to tell me. But he did confirm what I already knew. Molin was a Nazi who never reformed. One of the incurables.

He drove onto the bridge, intending to go back home to Borås, and before he reached the mainland, he had changed his mind.

H
e dreamed that he was walking through the forest to Molin's house. The wind was blowing so hard that he could scarcely keep his balance. He had an axe in his hand and was frightened of something behind him. When he came to the house he stopped at the dog pen. The strong wind had dropped altogether, as if somebody had snipped an audio track in his dream. In the pen were two dogs, both hurling themselves in a frenzy at the wire mesh.

He gave a start and was jerked out of his dream. It wasn't the dogs breaking through the wire mesh, but a woman standing in front of him, tapping him on the shoulder.

“We don't like people to be asleep in here,” she said sternly. “This is a library, not a sunporch.”

“I'm very sorry.”

Lindman looked dozily around the reading room. An elderly man with a pointy mustache was reading
Punch.
He looked like a caricature of a British gentleman. He was glaring disapprovingly at Lindman. Lindman pulled towards him the book he had fallen asleep over, and checked his watch. 6:15. How long had he been asleep? Ten minutes, perhaps, surely no more. He shook his head, forced the dogs out of his mind, and pored over the book again.

He had made up his mind coming back over the bridge. He would make a nocturnal visit to Wetterstedt's apartment. He couldn't bear the thought of another night at the hotel, though. He would simply wait until night fell, then go into the apartment. Until then, all he could do was wait. He parked his car within walking distance of Lagmansgatan and found a hardware store, where he'd bought a screwdriver and the
smallest jimmy he could find. Then he'd picked out a cheap pair of gloves at a men's department store. He wandered around the town until he felt hungry, ate at a pizzeria, and read the local newspaper, the
Barometer.
After two cups of coffee he'd tried to make up his mind whether to go back to his car and sleep for an hour or two or to continue his walk. Then it occurred to him that he might do best by going to the local library. He'd asked for assistance, and in the section devoted to history he'd found what he was looking for. A fat volume on the history of German Nazism, and a thinner book on the Hitler period in Sweden. He soon discarded the big tome, but the smaller one had captured his attention.

It was lucidly written, and after less than an hour's reading he realized something that he hadn't grasped before. Something Wetterstedt had said, and maybe also Berggren: that in the 1930s and up to around 1943 or 1944, Nazism had been much more widespread in Sweden than most people nowadays were aware of. There had been various branches of Nazi parties that squabbled between themselves, but behind the men and women in the parades there had been a gray mass of anonymous people who had admired Hitler and would have liked nothing more than a German invasion and the establishment of a Nazi regime in Sweden. He found astonishing information about the government's concessions to the Germans, and how exports of iron ore from Sweden had been crucial in enabling the German munitions industry to satisfy Hitler's constant demand for more tanks and other war materials. He wondered what had happened to all that history when he was a schoolboy. What he vaguely remembered from his history classes was a very different picture: a Sweden that had succeeded—by means of extremely clever policies and by skillfully walking a tightrope—in staying out of the war. The Swedish government had remained strictly neutral and thus saved the country from being crushed by the German military machine. He'd heard nothing about groups of homegrown Nazis. What he was now discovering was an entirely different picture, one which explained Molin's actions, his delight at crossing the border into Norway and looking forward to going on to Germany. He could envisage young Mattson-Herzén, his father and mother, and Wetterstedt and the gray mass of people hovering between the lines of the text, or in the blurred background of the photographs of demonstrations by Nazis in Swedish streets.

That was when he must have fallen asleep and started dreaming about the frenzied dogs.

The
Punch
man stood up and left the reading room. Two girls, heads almost touching, sat whispering and giggling. Lindman guessed that they probably came from the Middle East. That made him think about what he'd been reading: about how Uppsala students had protested against Jewish doctors who'd been persecuted in Germany and were seeking asylum in Sweden. They had been refused entry.

 

 

He went downstairs to the circulation desk. There was no sign of the woman who'd woken him up. He found a restroom, and washed his face in cold water. Then he returned to the reading room. The giggling girls had left. There was a newspaper lying on the table where they'd been sitting. He went to investigate what they'd been reading. It was in Arabic script. They'd left behind a faint perfume. It reminded him that he should call Elena. Then he sat down to read the last chapter: “Nazism in Sweden after the War.” He read about all the factions and various more or less clumsily organized attempts to establish a Swedish Nazi party that would carry real political weight. Behind all those small groups and local organizations that kept coming and going, changing their names and symbolically scratching out each other's eyes, he could still sense the gray mass assembling at the blurred periphery. They had nothing to do with the little neo-Nazi boys with shaven heads. They were not the ones who robbed banks, murdered police officers, or beat up innocent immigrants. He was clear about the difference between them and the weirdos who demonstrated in the streets and shouted the praises of Karl XII.

He put the book to one side, and wondered where the boy who kept watch over Wetterstedt fitted in. Was there in fact some kind of organization that nobody knew about, where people like Molin, Berggren, and Wetterstedt could make propaganda for their views? A secret room where a new generation—to which the boy standing behind Wetterstedt's chair belonged—could be admitted? He thought about what Wetterstedt had said about “papers winding up in the wrong hands.” The boy had reacted, and Wetterstedt had clammed up immediately.