Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (7 page)

Hjelm recoiled from the sudden, almost therapeutic oratory. He tried to change track: “And privately?”

“After cheating on his wife for years, he left her for a young girl who allowed herself to be impressed by his so-called refinement. He knocked her up immediately—but when it was time for the birth, he took off for Gothenburg in order to fuck himself silly at the book fair. When he got back to Stockholm,
she
had left with their newborn son. After that he spent most of his
time picking up impressed young girls who didn’t know that his refinement was just as transplanted as his hair. His performances at department parties and publishers’ parties are legendary; you can’t imagine them if you haven’t seen one.”

Hjelm blinked in surprise. He stared down at the obituary and compared Bertilsson’s oral account of Lars-Erik Hassel’s deeds with his written one. A truly sulfurous, infernal abyss opened up between them. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have taken it upon yourself to write this.” He waved the sheets of paper.

Erik Bertilsson shrugged. “There are assignments and then there are assignments. You just don’t say no to some of them, if you want even a shadow of a career. And I do want that.”

“But surely there must be some critics who are somewhat on the up-and-up?”

Bertilsson reprised his shrug. “Those are the ones who don’t earn any money. You have no idea what a tough business this is. Either you’re in or you’re out. There’s no in-between.”

Hjelm could have said much more but didn’t. Instead he regarded Bertilsson for a moment. He thought of the revolutionary books he’d read in the past year and tried to find any connection at all with the two representatives of cultural life he had met today.

It was impossible.

He thanked Bertilsson and left him alone in the empty stairwell. Bertilsson didn’t budge.

The long day trickled to its conclusion. Hjelm quite literally slipped into the subway car on a banana peel. After executing a graceful ballet step on his left ankle, he sat down and thoughtlessly
cursed, using words of a crude nature, and for the entire journey to Norsborg he found himself pierced by the burning glare of an old woman.

By the time they got to Mariatorget, he was able to ignore her. John Coltrane’s hypnotic sax haze carried him to another world—or rather, as he preferred to think of it, deeper into this one. A thought disrupted his universe of pure sound: maybe Lars-Erik Hassel’s character was not a completely negligible factor after all. Even if he couldn’t accept Bertilsson’s version as definitive, Hassel surely had quite a few skeletons in his closet, and conceivably they had risen again as vengeful spirits. Erinyes, he thought, and he was reminded of an earlier case. That it could in any way be connected with the Kentucky Killer was absurd, of course, but he left the door ajar, knowing from experience that as time went on, it was often through unclosed doors that the solution came creeping.

By six o’clock the A-Unit had had time to round out the day with one last meeting. Norlander was missing—perhaps he had grown tired of scrubbing the toilets—but otherwise everyone was there. No one had anything new to contribute. Hultin had pieced together a whole lot about the Kentucky Killer that he would take home to go through. Nyberg had wasted his time in vain in the underworld, of course—no one there knew anything. Chavez said he would get back to them with possible news from the Internet world early tomorrow morning. Söderstedt had found tons of potential Americans in hotels and hostels, on Finland ferries and domestic flights; he activated a whole armada of foot soldiers around Sweden, all of whom drew a blank. Kerstin Holm’s afternoon had been the most interesting, possibly because she
didn’t
come up with anything.

No one in the large flight crew could place the name Edwin Reynolds, and no one was struck by even the most minuscule whiff of retrospective suspicion. Perhaps one could trivially
conclude that he simply didn’t stand out. An everyman, like so many serial killers. One might suppose that a man who, hardly an hour earlier, had carried out a bestial, tortuous murder would stand out in some way, perhaps not with large, wild eyes, bloody clothes, and a dripping ice pick, but at least with something. The staff had no such recollections. But even that fact, after all, contained a certain amount of information.

Hjelm had compressed his rather voluminous afternoon harvest into a synopsis that he was quite pleased with: “There are differing opinions on Lars-Erik Hassel’s abilities.”

At Skärholmen, Hjelm drifted out of the musical haze, opened his eyes, and looked over at the next seat. The woman’s icy glare was still boring into him, as though he were the Antichrist. He allowed himself to not give a damn about her, fixed his eyes ahead, and was just about to close them when he saw Cilla on the opposite seat.

“Who’s watching the children?” slipped out of him. He bit his tongue far too late and cried out in pain.

Cilla gave him a measured look. “Hi yourself,” she said.

“Sorry.” He leaned forward and gave her a kiss. “I was somewhere else.”

She pointed at her ears with a scrunched expression.

He yanked out his earphones.

“You’re yelling,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said again, feeling like a social wreck.

“The children are sixteen and fourteen, as you may recall. They watch themselves.”

He shook his head and laughed. “I bit my tongue.”

“Far too late,” she said.

The ice was broken, by one of the little moments when they read each other’s minds and overlooked each other’s shortcomings; when the positive aspects of habit triumphed over the negative ones.

“Hi,” he started over, placing his hand on hers.

“Hi yourself.”

“Where have you been?”

“I bought a shower curtain at IKEA. The old one was moldy. Haven’t you seen those black spots?”

“I thought you had been throwing
snus
around.”

She smiled. She used to laugh at his stupid jokes, but now she smiled. He didn’t really know what that meant. That he wasn’t as funny anymore, or that she was worried that her teeth were stained brown from coffee?

Or was that what they called maturity?

He still thought she was beautiful: her blond hair in its slightly disheveled page boy; the years that had gathered the right way, around her eyes instead of her waist; her gift for dressing sexily. And then her penetrating looks, too seldom in use these days.

He loved to be seen through; this was an insight he’d had late in life, but that’s how it was. To be seen through is to be seen a second time, and that didn’t happen so often.
Because first impressions last
—he hated that an advertisement was echoing through him.

“Something happened at work,” she declared.

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said happily.

“What happened to your lip?”

“You’ll have to watch it on TV.”

They chatted a bit until Norsborg. He turned the job talk in her direction. She was a nurse on a rehab floor at Huddinge and was always ready with a heap of tragicomic stories. This time it was a brain-damaged patient who had urinated in the purse of one of her colleagues; the woman didn’t notice until she went to take out her SL card at the commuter train turnstile.

As they walked with their arms around each other through the outskirts of a neighborhood that everyone considered to be
a high-rise ghetto and that had once, what seemed like a very long time ago, been his workplace, and as the sun generously shared the nuances that had been well hidden during the day, and as a bit of summer warmth lingered in the air, and as the wasps buzzed in that dull, dying way, Paul Hjelm decided that this was what love looked like once you stepped into middle age. It could be worse.

They arrived home. Danne looked as if he’d been spilled onto the sofa; he was watching MTV. A social studies book with crumpled pages was open on the table. He was downing greenish soda. “It’s past seven,” the boy accused.

“I told you there was food in the fridge,” said Cilla, who began to unpack a shower curtain with gold Egyptian hieroglyphs on a dark green background.

“We
ate
,” said Danne without taking his eyes from the MTV screen. “What kind of fucking sludge was that?”

“Mexican fucking sludge,” Cilla said calmly, holding up the new shower curtain she’d bought. Apparently she was awaiting a statement from her husband.

“What does it say?” he said.

She made a face and carried it to the bathroom.

He opened a beer and called, “Maybe it’s Egyptian porn!”

Danne glared at him from the sofa.

After a few minutes she returned with the old shower curtain and showed him the horrible accumulation of mold: two small black spots down in the corner.

“What does this say about our household?” Cilla asked rhetorically, fingering the spots with disgust.

“That we take showers,” said Paul Hjelm.

She sighed and crumpled the old curtain into an overflowing garbage can. Then she took out the remains of the Mexican fucking sludge, put the plastic container in the microwave, sat down in front of the TV, and changed the channel.

Without a word, Danne took the remote and changed it back.

As Hjelm poured beer down his throat, he thought about how he had seen this scene before. Three thousand, four hundred, and eighty-six times. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Nineteen-oh-six and thirteen seconds,” said Cilla. She had just countered her son by pushing the text-TV button. Now a dark curtain of letters fell down across the MTV-filled screen.

“In just under four minutes, the clock will chime,” boomed the voice of the master. “I want to watch the local news.”

The battle on the sofa continued in silence. Thus far it had been a game. He hoped it would remain so.

The microwave dinged. Tova came down the stairs and groaned when she saw the spectacle on the sofa.

“Hi,” Hjelm said to his fourteen-year-old daughter.

“Hi,” she said. “You’re so late.”

“Cut it out.” He poured the Mexican fucking sludge onto two plates, dug out two spoons, poured two beers, and managed to balance it all as he brought it over to the living room sofa.

“Isn’t that a schoolbook?” he said to his son, who was attacking the pocket where Cilla had shoved the remote.

“Cut it out,” Danne echoed, as he pulled out the remote and got MTV back. It was on a commercial break, so he gave in. The paternal hand snatched the remote, changed it to channel two, and turned up the volume. There was about a minute left before the local news.

Hjelm had time to ask, “How’s school going?”

His son had just started upper secondary school, and Paul had devoted only a few wasted hours to trying to understand the school system. Danne was in something that went by the name “Program in Social Sciences,” and his lessons seemed decidedly simpler than the process of figuring out the curriculum.

“Good,” said Danne.

The theme music of the local news came on, just as abbreviated as his son’s reply.

“Here comes some great television art,” said Paul Hjelm. The rest of the family looked at him skeptically.

It came on right away. The anchorwoman spoke excitedly about a big crackdown on narcotics at Arlanda this morning—and about the dramatic assault of a top police officer in front of their cameras. Sensitive viewers were warned. Hjelm’s expectations rose.

Then Waldemar Mörner, the deputy commissioner of the National Police Board and the A-Unit’s formal boss, appeared on the screen.

His well-coiffed blond hair was impeccable, but he was breathing heavily, as though he had just personally chased some criminals through Arlanda. Presumably he had just tumbled out of the helicopter before he had any idea of what had happened; perhaps he had been jogging in place inside the helicopter. Neither his breathing nor his ignorance stopped him from looking confident and efficient—or from lying with no inhibitions.

“Waldemar Mörner, deputy commissioner of the National Police Board,” the reporter began. “What happened at Arlanda today?”

“The NCP acted on indications from the American police that a large quantity of narcotics would arrive at Arlanda today from the United States. I can’t go into specifics on the action itself.”

“Has anyone been apprehended?”

“At least one American citizen has been taken into custody in connection with smuggling narcotics, yes. We are expecting further apprehensions shortly.”

A man in handcuffs was seen at the edge of the screen. Hjelm recognized the notorious drug smuggler Robert E. Norton, surrounded by four armed Arlanda police officers. As they watched,
he managed to kick Mörner’s backside, knocking Mörner over with a shrill cry. When he fell, he grabbed the microphone, so the reporter followed him to the floor. The microphone cord must, in turn, have been wound around the cameraman’s legs, because he plunged to his face. Over the lengthy footage of Arlanda’s ceiling, they could hear the cameraman whimpering, the reporter moaning, and Mörner’s verbal gunfire: “Fuckinghellgoddamndildofuck.”

The producer didn’t cut until then; it wasn’t hard to imagine his sadistic smile.

Yet it was too early for the anchorwoman in the studio. As the camera caught her, she shouted in a panic, “Am I really supposed to read this?” When she realized she was on the air, she pulled herself together and struggled heroically to keep her composure as she read “Fortunately, no one was seriously injured in the drug dealer’s attack. Our reporter, however, suffered some oral injuries when the microphone, which had been pushed into his mouth, was removed.”

On the sofa in Norsborg, no one was required to keep their composure. When the gales of laughter ebbed, Paul returned the remote control to Danne. He caught Cilla’s glance. As she dried her tears and restored her face, her eyes were serious. She realized something was brewing.

They went to bed rather early; both had long days at work ahead. Danne was allowed to keep watching MTV; it wasn’t an evening when they really had the energy to be responsible parents. Experience told them that he was probably doing his homework as he watched.