The Blinded Man Read online

  Dritëro Frakulla was blinking rapidly. He aimed the gun alternately at Hjelm and at the three civil servants on the floor.

  Don’t ask me to turn round, thought Hjelm. Keep talking, keep talking. Focus on showing him sympathy. Use words that’ll make him think. Distract his attention.

  ‘Think about your family,’ he managed. ‘What will your children do without you to support them? What about your wife – does she work? What kind of job will she be able to get, Frakulla? What sort of qualifications does she have?’

  The shotgun was now aimed at him; that was what he wanted.

  Frakulla suddenly spoke, almost as if he were reciting the words, in clear Swedish: ‘The worse crimes I commit, the longer we’ll be able to stay in this country. They won’t send my family away without me. I’m sacrificing myself for their sake.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Frakulla. Your family will be deported immediately, forced to return to the Serbs without any means of defending themselves. What do you think the Serbs will do with a woman and a couple of pre-school kids that tried to flee from them? And what do you think will happen to you if you’re charged with murdering a cop, an unarmed cop?’

  For a second the man lowered the shotgun an inch or two, looking utterly confused. That was enough for Hjelm. He reached back to fumble at his waistband, pulled out his service revolver and fired one shot.

  A voice was silenced inside him: ‘Why the hell are you still disgusted by a woman’s bodily functions?’

  For a moment that seemed lifted out of time everything was absolutely still. Frakulla held the shotgun in a tight grip. His inscrutable eyes bored straight into Hjelm’s. Anything could happen.

  ‘Ai,’ said Dritëro Frakulla, dropped the gun and toppled forward.

  For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, thought Hjelm, and felt sick.

  The male civil servant grabbed the shotgun and pressed the muzzle hard against Frakulla’s head. A patch of blood was growing larger under the man’s right shoulder.

  ‘Drop the weapon, you fuck!’ yelled Hjelm, and vomited.

  3

  AT FIRST IT’S only the piano’s bizarre little strolls up and down the keys, accompanied by a hi-hat and maybe the faint clash of a cymbal, possibly the sweep of the brushes on the snare drum as well. Occasionally the fingers digress a bit from the marked path of their climb, into a light, bluesy feeling, but without breaking the choppy rhythm of the strutting two-four beat. Then a slight pause, the saxophone joins the same riff and everything changes. Now the bass comes in, calmly walking up and down. The sax takes over, and the piano scatters sporadic comping chords in the background, broken by a few ramblings behind the apparently indolent improvisations of the sax.

  He presses the tweezers into the hole, tugging and tugging.

  The saxophone chirps with slight dissonance, then instantly falls back into the melodic theme. The piano goes silent; it’s so quiet that the audience can be heard in the background.

  The tweezers pull out what they’ve been looking for.

  The sax man says ‘Yeah’ a couple of times, in between a couple of rambles. The audience says ‘Yeah’. Long drawn-out notes. The piano is still absent. Scattered applause.

  Then the piano returns and takes over. It meanders as before, making successive detours, rumbles, ever freer trills. Just the piano, bass and drums.

  He presses the tweezers into the second hole. This time it’s easier. He drops both lumps into his pocket. He sits down on the sofa.

  The wanderings of the piano have returned to their starting point. Now the bass is gone. Then it comes back in, along with the sax. All four now, in a veiled promenade. Then the applause. Yeah.

  He presses the remote. A vast silence ensues.

  He gets up cautiously. Stands for a moment in the big room. High over his head dust motes circulate in the non-existent draught around the crystal chandelier. The dull metal on the streamlined shape of the stereo reflects nothing of the faint light: Bang & Olufsen.

  Bang, bang, he thinks. Olufsen, he thinks. Then he stops thinking.

  He runs his gloved hand lightly over the shiny leather surface of the sofa before he allows himself to tread tentatively across the pleasantly creaking parquet floor. He avoids the huge Pakistani carpet, hand-knotted over a month’s time by the slave labour of Pakistani children, and goes out into the corridor. He opens the door and steps out onto the terrace, stopping for a moment, close to the hammock.

  He fills his lungs with the tranquil, chilly air of the spring night, letting his eyes rest on the rows of apple trees: Astrakhans and Åkerös, Ingrid Maries and Lobos, White Transparents and Kanikers. Each tree is labelled with a little sign; he noticed that on his way in. So far the apples can be found only on the signs, showy, brilliantly hued, long before any blossoms have even appeared. Flat, surrogate apples.

  He would like to believe that it’s crickets that he hears; otherwise it’s inside his head. Sonic bang, he thinks. And Olufsen, he thinks.

  Although it wasn’t a real bang, of course.

  Leaving the terrace, he closes the door behind him, goes back down the long corridor and returns to the enormous living room. Once again he avoids the red-flamed frescos of the hand-knotted carpet, goes over to the stereo and presses the eject button. In a vaguely elliptical trajectory, the cassette tape gently rises out of the tape deck. He plucks it out and puts it in his pocket. He turns off the stereo.

  He looks around the room. What an atmosphere, he thinks. Even the dust motes seem custom-made to complement the crystal chandelier, as they elegantly swirl around it.

  In his mind’s eye he sees a list. In his mind he ticks off each item.

  Kuno, he thinks, laughing. Isn’t that the name of a party game?

  He leaves the living room by a slightly different route. A teak table and four matching, high-backed chairs stand on another hand-knotted rug; he imagines that it’s Persian. It is predominantly beige, in contrast to the red Pakistani carpet.

  Although right now they’re very similar.

  Close to the table he has to step over what is colouring the Persian rug red. Then he lifts his legs to step over someone else’s.

  Out in the garden a drowsy full moon peeks from behind its fluffy cloud cover, as a veiled fairylike dance skims the bare apple trees.

  4

  DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT ERIK Bruun must have pressed a green button somewhere on his desk, because accompanied by a buzzing sound a green light lit up his name-plate on the doorframe out in the hallway. Paul Hjelm, in turn, pressed down on the handle to the perpetually locked door and went in.

  This was the police station, whose peculiar geographic coordinates were something like this: located in Fittja, with mailing address in Norsborg, in Botkyrka municipality, Huddinge police authority. If you wanted to avoid using the name Fittja, because of its obscene and derogatory association with the Swedish word for pussy, you could always say Botkyrka, which, in addition to providing the location for the church, encompassed quite lovely areas such as Vårsta and Grödinge; or you could say Norsborg, the hometown of the table-tennis genius J. O. Waldner and the Balrog floorball team; or you could use the name Huddinge, even if it sounded like a bedroom suburb. Hjelm lived in a terraced house in Norsborg, just a few doors from Waldner’s birthplace. But he could never really specify which district he lived in, least of all now.

  The place that God forgot, he thought fatefully as he stepped into Bruun’s room. The wallpaper was changed at least once a year, nevertheless it would turn brown within a matter of days. Erik Bruun always inaugurated his new wallpaper by allowing his black cigars and equally black lungs to puff clouds of smoke over the walls. Hjelm had never visited Bruun in his bachelor apartment in Eriksberg; the place had acquired a reputation of mythic proportions, but he could imagine how the walls must look. Hjelm was a non-smoker, although he did inhale an occasional cigarette to avoid becoming a slave to virtue, as a wise man once expressed it.

  Today Hjelm had a
lready smoked six, and he knew that there would be more. The nicotine was swirling around in his head, and for once he sensed no immediate shock upon stepping into Bruun’s inner sanctum, which the authorities had designated a serious health hazard. An overly zealous official had once taped a skull and crossbones to the door, and Hjelm and Ernstsson had spent three hours of valuable work time scraping it off.

  Erik Bruun was not alone in the room. He was sitting behind his cluttered desk, puffing on an enormous Russian cigar. On the sofa below the row of windows sat two well-dressed gentlemen. They were about Hjelm’s age, somewhere in their forties. But no one would ever think of calling Hjelm a gentleman; in their case, it seemed natural. He didn’t know these gentlemen, but he recognised the stern set of their expressions.

  Oh well. This was pretty much what he’d been expecting.

  Bruun raised his substantial body to a standing position and came forward to meet him; such an attempt at a jogging workout was rare for him. He shook hands with Hjelm and scratched his greyish-red beard.

  ‘My congratulations,’ he said, putting obvious stress on the word my. ‘Excellent job. How do you feel? Have you talked to Cecilia?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Hjelm, glancing at the gentlemen on the sofa. ‘I haven’t been able to get hold of her yet. I assume she’ll probably hear about it some other way.’

  Bruun nodded several times and returned to his favourite chair.

  ‘As I said, you have the congratulations and support of everyone here at the station. But you didn’t answer my question about how you’re feeling.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Hjelm, and sat down on the chair in front of the desk.

  Bruun nodded several times again, in the same knowing manner.

  ‘I understand,’ he said, sucking on his cigar. ‘This is Niklas Grundström and Ulf Mårtensson, from Internal Affairs. Whether they intend to offer you their congratulations is an open question at the moment.’

  Since Bruun’s little tirade sounded as if he was on the verge of leaving, both gentlemen got up from the sofa. Then came a moment of doubt as the superintendent remained where he was and continued puffing on his black cigar. This display of a hint of uncertainty was what both of them would have given anything to avoid. Hjelm thanked Bruun with a seemingly neutral expression and received the same look in return.

  The superintendent took one last puff and sluggishly got to his feet. ‘The ombudsman for department safety has determined that I’m not allowed to leave my office holding a cigar,’ he apologised, stubbing the butt into an ashtray. Then he left the office swathed in a cloud of cigar fumes.

  The crushed butt continued to emit brown smoke. Grundström pushed aside the ashtray as if it were a month-old latrine bucket and sat, with some reluctance, in Bruun’s smoke-saturated executive desk chair. Mårtensson sat back down on the sofa. Grundström set his briefcase on the desk and pulled out a pair of glasses with almost perfectly round lenses, which he ceremoniously placed on the bridge of his nose. Then he took out a large brown envelope and an evening newspaper. He set the briefcase on the floor and held up the front page of Expressen. In big letters the headline screamed: EXTRA. HERO IN FITTJA. POLICE HERO IN HOSTAGE DRAMA. Under the headline was a photograph, almost ten years old, of Paul Hjelm, who had been a police sergeant when it was taken.

  ‘The media have assigned the roles,’ Niklas Grundström said in a clear, educated voice, tossing the newspaper aside. He fixed his gaze on Hjelm. ‘Things certainly move fast these days, don’t they? Imagine, they got the story into the evening edition. The pen moves faster than the brain.’

  ‘An old proverb,’ Hjelm said without thinking. He bit his tongue.

  Grundström regarded him without expression. He leaned down and pulled a little tape recorder from his briefcase. ‘I was hoping to avoid this,’ he said, pressing the start button. ‘Interrogation with Detective Inspector Paul Hjelm, born 18 February 1957, conducted by Grundström and Mårtensson at the Huddinge police station on March the thirtieth at seventeen-o-six hours.’

  ‘Interrogation?’ said Hjelm.

  ‘Interrogation,’ said Grundström. ‘It was your choice.’

  Hjelm bit his tongue again. Don’t give them anything.

  Then it came. ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of any anti-immigrant organisation?’

  ‘No,’ replied Hjelm, trying to stay perfectly calm.

  ‘What is your attitude towards immigrants?’

  ‘Neither good nor bad.’

  Grundström rummaged through the big brown envelope, took out something that looked like a report and began reading. ‘Of all your arrests made during your time in this district, forty-two per cent were of individuals of foreign origin. And in the past year that figure increased to fifty-seven per cent.’

  Hjelm cleared his throat and paused to gather his thoughts. ‘According to the latest figures, in all of Botkyrka municipality, thirty-two per cent of the population are of foreign origin, and twenty per cent are foreign-born citizens. Up here in the north, in Alby, Fittja, Hallunda and Norsborg, the figures are even higher, well over fifty per cent and fifty-seven per cent. A forty-two per cent arrest rate of immigrants actually indicates that there is a greater propensity to commit a crime among Swedish-born individuals in the area. The figures demonstrate no basis whatsoever for racism, if that’s what you’re getting at.’ Hjelm was quite pleased with his reply.

  Grundström was not. ‘Why the hell did you think you could go in there like some sort of Dirty Harry and shoot that man?’

  ‘That man, as you call him, is named Dritëro Frakulla, and he belongs to the Albanian minority in the province of Kosovo in southern Serbia, and I’m sure you’re aware of the situation there. Nearly all the Kosovar Albanians that we’ve had anything to do with here, people who have become acclimatised and learned Swedish and who have children in the Swedish school system – nearly all of them are now going to be deported. But it’s not going to happen without resistance.’

  ‘All the more reason not to go in and shoot him down. The hostage team of the National Criminal Police was on its way. Specialists, experts. Why in holy hell did you go in alone?’

  Hjelm could no longer keep silent. ‘To save his life, goddamn it!’

  * * *

  It was approaching eight P.M. Hjelm and Bruun were sitting in Bruun’s office, the superintendent in his armchair and Hjelm in a semi-reclining position on the sofa. In front of them on the desk stood a large cassette recorder. The tape was playing. They heard: ‘To save his life, goddamn it!’

  Bruun practically swallowed his cigar. He hit the stop button with a swift chop.

  ‘You, sir,’ he said, pointing at Hjelm with the same abrupt movement, ‘are a very foolhardy person.’

  ‘It was stupid, I know …’ said Hjelm from the sofa. ‘Just as stupid as secretly taping an Internal Affairs interrogation.’

  Bruun shrugged and started the tape again. First a brief pause, then Hjelm’s voice resumed:

  ‘That unit specialises in one thing, and you know that as well as I do: their directive is to render the perpetrator harmless without injuring the hostages. Render harmless, meaning eliminate, meaning kill.’

  ‘Do you really want us to believe that you shot him in order to save his life?’

  ‘Believe whatever the hell you like.’

  Bruun glanced at Hjelm, shaking his head sternly; now it was Hjelm’s turn to shrug.

  ‘That’s precisely what we’re not allowed to do.’ Grundström had spoken in his normal voice; the last couple of things he said had sounded different. ‘We’re here to determine right from wrong, to ensure that you haven’t committed any dereliction of duty, and then clear your name without issuing any reprimands. That’s how the justice system becomes undermined. If necessary, we may have to censure you. This has nothing to do with our personal beliefs.’

  ‘For the record’ – Hjelm – ‘the shooting took place at eight forty-seven A.M., the special unit arrived at nine
thirty-eight. Were we supposed to just sit there taking cover outside, and wait for almost an hour, with a desperate gunman, terrified hostages and a paralysed Hallunda shopping centre on our hands?’

  ‘Okay, for the moment let’s drop the question of why and take a look at what you de facto did.’

  Pause. Grundström and Mårtensson had switched places then, while Hjelm pondered what sort of person says de facto.

  The sharp voice was replaced by one that was significantly coarser. ‘All right then. So far we’ve just skimmed the surface. Now let’s get down to brass tacks.’

  With a frown, Bruun switched off the tape recorder and turned to Hjelm with genuine surprise.

  ‘Do you mean to tell me that they in all seriousness tried to pull that good-cop–bad-cop routine on you? When you’re an experienced interrogator?’

  Hjelm shrugged as fatigue overtook him. An already long day wasn’t going to get any shorter. When Mårtensson spoke again, his voice merged with words and images from all the other layers of Hjelm’s mind. For a brief moment as he hovered between wakefulness and sleep, these layers fought for dominance. Then he fell asleep.

  ‘Okay, one step at a time. First, you shouted through the door without any warning; that alone could have caused a disaster. Second, you claimed to be unarmed, even though your gun was sticking out of your waistband. All he had to do was ask you to turn round, which would also have been a disaster. Third, you lied to the perpetrator. If he’d been aware of certain facts, again, disaster would have ensued. Fourth, when you fired, you aimed at a spot that was not according to regulations; that also could have led to disaster.’

  ‘How is he?’ Hjelm’s voice.

  ‘What?’ Mårtensson’s.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Who the hell do you mean?’

  ‘Dritëro Frakulla.’

  ‘What the fuck is that? The name of some kind of orange? A Transylvanian count? Just focus on the facts, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘It is a fact. That is a fact.’