Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (2 page)

The question now was whether he had gotten an overdose of peace and quiet, because suddenly one day, after the nearly six months it took to tie up the Power Murder case and come to a verdict, he realized that the mighty Hjelm train had been transformed into a little model railroad set. Wide-open spaces and endless skies turned out to actually be the cement floor, walls, and ceiling of a hobby room; and the train’s speedy departure turned out to be nothing more than a perpetually recurring circle.

His first doubts about the purpose of the A-Unit’s existence were accompanied by a whole series of further doubts. His return to the same old ruts felt more and more like a bad
stage production of his daily routine. As though everywhere he went were poorly constructed, as though there were no ground under the railroad tracks, as though the tiniest puff of air would blow it over.

Hjelm looked at himself in the mirror: about forty, with medium-blond, standard Swedish hair and a receding hairline. In general, his was hardly an appearance that attracted attention—aside from his blemish, from which he now removed a small flake of skin and onto which he rubbed a bit of skin cream. Then he returned to the window. The morning was still motionless. The small yellow leaf was lying still where it had landed. No breeze had descended upon the police headquarters courtyard.

What they needed was a robust serial killer, of a robust, international character, thought Paul Hjelm as he slid back into his orgy of self-pity.

Sure, Cilla had returned. Sure, he himself had returned. But not once had they ever discussed what they’d really done and felt during their separation. At first he’d seen this as a sign of mutual trust, but then he began to suspect that it was a chasm they would never be able to bridge, other than by artificial means. And how were the children doing, really? Danne was sixteen now, and Tova would be fourteen soon, and sometimes when he caught their averted, sidelong glances, he wondered whether he had used up all the store of trust they had in him. Had the strange summer almost a year ago left traces that would distort their lives long after his own death? It was mind-boggling.

And his relationship with Kerstin Holm, his colleague, also seemed to have entered a new phase. They ran into each other several times a day, and each time it felt more strained. Hiding behind their exchanged glances were abysses that hadn’t been touched upon but that seemed more and more to demand attention. Not even his good relationships with his boss, Jan-Olov
Hultin, and with his colleagues Gunnar Nyberg and Jorge Chavez seemed quite the same, as the little model train circled around and around in its stuffy room.

And then finally came the awful suspicion that the only thing that had changed was—him. Because he really
had
changed. He listened to music he’d never even considered before, and he found himself glued to books he’d never heard of. On his desk, a portable CD player lay next to a tattered paperback. In the CD player was John Coltrane’s mysterious
Meditations
, one of the sax master’s last albums, a strange mixture of wild improvisation and quiet reverence; and the book was Kafka’s
Amerika
, the least renowned of his novels but in some ways the most curious. Paul Hjelm would never forget the chain of events that is set into motion when the young Karl lands in New York Harbor, realizes that he’s forgotten his umbrella, and returns to the steamer. He was convinced that that kind of scene comes back to you when you’re about to die.

Sometimes he blamed the books and the music for his metaphor of the model railroad. Maybe he would have been happier if he still saw wide, open spaces and long, straight roads around him.

His gaze returned to the courtyard. The little yellow leaf was still there. Everything was motionless.

Suddenly and without warning, the leaf was lifted up into a spiraling whirlwind, and several more leaves were torn away, yellow ones as well as green ones; they performed a wild, multicolored dance between the walls of police headquarters. Then the dance stopped as suddenly as it had started; the lone whirlwind continued invisibly on its way, and all that was left was a lonely pile of leaves on the dreary cement.

The door was flung open. Jorge Chavez came in. The presence of this thirty-year-old dynamo of a desk mate always made Hjelm feel a decade older. But he could deal with it—Chavez
was one of his best friends these days. He had come to the A-Unit from the precinct in Sundsvall, where he had given himself the title of the only blackhead cop in Norrland. Actually, though, he was a Stockholmer, the son of Chilean refugees in Rågsved. Hjelm never really understood how Chavez had passed the physical requirements for entry to the police college; he was no more than five foot six. On the other hand, he was one of the sharpest policemen in the country—certainly the most energetic one Hjelm had ever come across. In addition, he was an elite-level jazz bassist.

Chavez’s compact little figure slid silently to his end of the double desk. He took his shoulder holster from the chair, fastened it onto himself, checked his service pistol, and pulled on his summer jacket of light linen.

“Something’s up,” he said curtly. “Full speed ahead down the corridor.”

Hjelm copied Chavez’s movements, while asking a bit doubtfully, “What do you mean, ‘full speed ahead’?”

“Hard to define. But we’re going to hear Hultin’s voice within thirty seconds, for sure. Want to make a bet?”

Paul Hjelm shook his head. He looked at the CD player and the book on the desk, then at the pile of leaves in the courtyard, shook some life into himself, and jumped onto the locomotive. Time took on a new form.

A curt voice boomed over the intercom; it belonged to the A-Unit’s operative director, Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin: “Quick meeting. Everyone. Immediately.”

Hjelm pulled his leather jacket over his shoulder holster and was wholeheartedly present. He and Chavez half-ran toward the room that had once gone by the name “Supreme Central Command” and that—he thought hopefully—might do so once again. On their way through the hall, a door flew open in Chavez’s face, and Viggo Norlander hurtled out. Though he had
once been the group’s dependable rule follower, since the Power Murders Norlander had become their bad boy; he had replaced his old, worn-out bureaucrat suits with trendy polo shirts and leather jackets, and his slight midlife flab was upgraded to a genuine six-pack.

The rest of the group was already assembled when Norlander and Hjelm tumbled in. Chavez arrived just behind them with a handkerchief to his nose. Detective Superintendent Jan-Olov Hultin surveyed him skeptically from the desk at the front of the unexceptional little room; he was sitting there like an owl, or rather like a bored junior high school teacher who’d been forgotten by the pension board. His diminutive glasses were perched in their proper place, like a small, natural growth, on his giant nose. No newly kindled passion shone in his eyes, though something may have smoldered in their corners. He cleared his throat.

All the members of the select group were actually there; all of them had, as usual, flex-timed in early so they could go home early, and none had been loaned out to some strange posting elsewhere as punishment. Gunnar Nyberg, Arto Söderstedt, and Kerstin Holm were already sitting up front. Nyberg and Söderstedt were of the same generation as Norlander, which meant they were a few years older than Hjelm and many years older than Chavez; Holm was somewhere between the latter two. She was the only woman in the group; a short, dark-complected Gothenburger, she was the third cog in the trio of brains, along with Hjelm and Chavez.

On the other hand, she had something very important in common with the group’s purest bundle of energy, her office mate Gunnar Nyberg: both sang in a choir and weren’t ashamed to be caught singing
a cappella
numbers in their office. Nyberg had a colorful past as a brutal, steroid-using body builder, but nowadays he was a timid middle-aged man, a sloppily clad mountain
of meat with a lovely singing voice who could still break out his old moves if necessary. During the investigation of the Power Murders, having already taken a bullet in his throat, he had tackled an accelerating car and put it out of action. Söderstedt, for his part, was one of the strangest group members, a Finland-Swedish, chalk-white former top lawyer whose conscience had caught up to him; he always worked apart from the others, following his own paths off the beaten track.

Norlander, Chavez, and Hjelm took places in the row behind the trio. Then Hultin began in his customarily neutral voice, “A Swedish citizen has been murdered in the United States. But not just
anyone
, not just
anywhere
, and not
by
just anyone. A relatively well-known Swedish literary critic was killed a few hours ago at Newark International Airport, outside New York. He was sadistically tortured by a serial killer whose activity goes back several decades. Up to this point, it has nothing to do with us.”

Apparently there was time for one of Hultin’s dramatic pauses, because what followed was that very thing.

“Our dilemma,” he continued, “is that this robust serial killer of a robust international character is on his way here.”

Another moment of silence, a bit more loaded.

“The information from the FBI indicates that the killer took the literary critic’s seat on the flight. At this very moment he is on flight SK 904, which will land at Arlanda in just under an hour, at 08:10. All together the plane is carrying 163 passengers, and the police in New York have chosen
not
to inform the crew of the situation. At present we are in a state of uncertainty as to the identity of the perpetrator, which isn’t so strange when you consider that he’s been eluding the FBI for twenty years. But they hope to find out what name he’s traveling under before the plane lands—I have an open line to a Special Agent Larner in New York. And so we need two parallel plans. One: we get the name in time, in which case there’s a risk of a scuffle. Two: we
don’t
get the name in time, in which case we have to try to pick out from among 163 passengers an elusive serial killer whose only known characteristics are that he is a white male, probably over forty-five years old.”

Hultin stood and pulled the zipper of his old sport jacket up over the butt of his pistol in its shoulder holster. He leaned forward.

“This whole thing is really quite simple,” he said tranquilly. “If we fail, Sweden has imported its first real American serial killer. Let’s avoid that.”

He tromped off toward the waiting helicopter, leaving behind the following words of wisdom:

“The world is shrinking, ladies and gentlemen. The world is shrinking.”

The immense, irreplaceable calm that always appears comes in expanding waves of bliss. He knows he will never stop.

Outside, the tremendous emptiness stretches on, with the earth as a tiny, negligible exception. A magnificent speck of fly shit on the great white page of perfection, a protocol error that has likely destroyed the limitless divinity of the divine.

A thin sheet of Plexiglas separates him from the great, sucking holes of nothingness that his serenity makes him part of. He copulates with it in divine, swaying movements.

The peaceful rocking of the clouds drives the images away. They are far away now. He can even think about them. And at no point does the peaceful smile leave his lips.

He can even think about the walk down to the cellar. It isn’t a series of images now—if it had been, he would have to conjure
it away, smoke it out by the burning sacrifice—it’s a story, with a logical, coherent structure. And even if he knows it will soon be lost again and will call on its sacrificial smoke, he is able to find pleasure in its sudden, crystal-clear perfection.

He is on his way.

He is on his way down the stairs he didn’t know existed, down into the cellar he didn’t know existed. The secret passage in the closet. The unforgettable, sweet-dusted air in the stairway. The silent cement stairs that seem to go on forever. The raw, clammy cold of the handrail.

The completely self-evident logic of the initiation. When eyes can be raised and steps can follow steps on the stairs down into the pitch black, the logic is indisputable. He has been chosen.

It has to come full circle. That is what has to be done now. Then he can begin for real.

The stairs lead on. Every trace of light vanishes. He feels his way ahead, step by step.

He allows himself to pause while the calm rocks him closer to relieving sleep. He follows the imperfect wing of the plane as it swings imperfectly out into the perfect swing of eternity.

Another light becomes visible, a completely different light, and it accompanies his last steps down the staircase. Like the frame of an icon around a darkness brighter than any light, the light shoots out from behind the door. A halo showing the way. A golden frame around a future work of art.

Which will now be completed.

He cracks open the door to the Millennium.

Outside the window, the Big Dipper slides into the Little Dipper, making an Even Bigger Dipper.

“Tonight we can offer you the special SAS Swedish-American drink for a long night’s flight, sir,” he hears a gentle female voice half-singing.

But by then he is already asleep.

The A-Unit lifted off from the helicopter pad atop police headquarters at 07:23 on Wednesday, September 3. The seven of them were crowded together into a group that didn’t really exist anymore. For a split second, Paul Hjelm thought that they were just imitating a unit whose time had come and gone, but the second passed, and he focused on his task, like everyone else.

He was crammed between the huge, faintly panting body of Gunnar Nyberg and the much thinner skeletal shell of Arto Söderstedt. Across from him, Kerstin Holm’s small, dark body was squeezed between Viggo Norlander’s now extremely fit late-middle-aged muscles and Jorge Chavez’s youthfully unscathed compactness.

Between these two rows of people, Jan-Olov Hultin was crouching in a position that shouldn’t have been possible for a man in his sixties—even if he was still a formidable center back on their police league soccer team. And he had such an impressive pile of papers that it shouldn’t have been possible to gather them up at such short notice. He coaxed his glasses up onto his monumental nose. The need to shout over the din from the helicopter caused his voice to lose a bit of its neutral tone.