Bad Blood: A Crime Novel Read online

  The only thing Hjelm knew about Hassel was that he had been a literary critic. He had seen the man’s name in the arts and leisure section of the big daily paper once or twice; other than that he was blank.

  He wandered along Norr Mälarstrand and crossed Rålambshovsparken, where the brännboll players went stubbornly bare-chested, despite the goose bumps that were visible from a distance of twenty yards. How did the old Farmer’s Almanac line go? Sweat the summer in; freeze in the winter?

  At the newspaper building, the receptionist advised him with a well-practiced apologetic expression that the elevators were temporarily out of order, and Hjelm found himself sweating the winter in as he trudged up the stairs. In the arts and leisure offices, the atmosphere was downhearted but bustling. Hjelm asked to speak with someone in charge and was supplied with a bundle of more or less aged issues of the arts and leisure section while he waited for the arts editor, who was rushing back and forth. He read the pages more carefully than he had in a long time and found a few articles by Hassel. He devoted just over half an hour to improving himself before the editor let him into his office, where the piles of books seemed to grow as he watched.

  The editor stroked his grizzled beard, extended a hand, and said briskly, “Möller. Sorry you had to wait. I’m sure you can imagine what things are like here right now.”

  “Hjelm,” said Hjelm, removing a pile of papers from a chair and sitting down.

  “Hjelm,” said Möller, sinking down behind his cluttered desk. “Aha.”

  He didn’t say more, but Hjelm realized that the old epithets “Hallunda Hero” and “Power Murders” were not so easily gnawed away by the tooth of time. Like all old heroes, he was confronted day and night by his insufficient heroism.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said curtly.

  Möller shook his head. “It’s a bit difficult to understand,” he said. “What actually happened? The information we’ve received so far is scanty, to say the least. What should we write in the obituary? We can’t exactly pull out the old ‘after a lengthy illness.’ That much I’ve understood.”

  “He was murdered,” Hjelm said mercilessly. “At the airport.”

  Möller shook his head again. “At the airport.… Talk about bad luck. I thought New York was safe now. The New York model. ‘Zero tolerance,’ ‘community policing,’ and all that. For fuck’s sake, that’s why he was there!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was going to get a cultural perspective on the new, peaceful spirit of New York. I guess you could call it the irony of fate.”

  “Did he have time to write anything?”

  “No. He was gathering impressions. He’d been there for a week and was going to devote the week after he returned home to writing the article.”

  “So the newspaper was paying for the trip?”

  “Of course,” said Möller, affronted.

  “Was Lars-Erik Hassel on the permanent staff?”

  “Yes. He had been on the editorial staff for almost twenty years.”

  “A baby boomer,” slipped out of Hjelm.

  Möller glared at him. “That’s a term we prefer not to use here. It’s been corrupted by all manner of misuse.”

  Hjelm observed him for a moment, then couldn’t help but argue a bit. “The article on the new, peaceful spirit of New York probably cost half a month’s salary, say fifteen thousand kronor including taxes and fees, plus travel and board, another twenty thousand. All together, maybe more than fifty thousand kronor.”

  Möller’s face darkened, and he shrugged. “You can’t count it like that. Some articles cost more, some less. What are you getting at?”

  “Did he have any contacts in New York? Friends? Enemies?”

  “Not that I know of, no.”

  “Did you or anyone else on the editorial staff have personal contact with him during the past week?”

  “I spoke with him once, yes. He had just been to the Metropolitan and was very pleased.”

  “And the visit to the Metropolitan was going to be included in the fifty-thousand-kronor article?”

  Hjelm sensed that he had to stop if he didn’t want to lose Möller completely. He changed his tone: “We’re going to need to speak with his family. What family relationships did he have?”

  Möller sighed deeply and looked at the clock.

  A younger, bald man came storming into the office and waved some papers. “Sorry to interrupt,” he panted. “We’re running out of time. Lars-Erik’s obituary is almost finished, but what are we going to put as the cause of death? Should I forget about it? We have to put something, don’t we?”

  Möller gestured tiredly toward Hjelm and asked, “What can we write?”

  “That he was murdered,” said Hjelm.

  The young man stared at him. “Nothing more?” he said at last.

  “That should do,” said Hjelm.

  The man rushed out again. Through the windows in the office door, Hjelm watched him return to his computer and peck at the keyboard with the light touch of a professional butcher.

  “Obituaries for the young are hard,” Möller said tiredly. “When someone dies unexpectedly, you have to start from scratch. It takes a lot of hard work.”

  “And when someone dies expectedly?” said Hjelm.

  “We have a store of obituaries.”

  Hjelm couldn’t believe his ears. “You have a store of obituaries for living people? What are you saying?”

  Möller sighed deeply. “It’s clear that you’re not particularly familiar with editorial work. Are we ever going to get this over with? Where were we?”

  “Family relationships,” said Hjelm.

  “Lars-Erik had lived alone for several years. He had two marriages behind him, with one son from each. I’ll get you the addresses.”

  Möller paged through a large address book, made a few chicken scratches, and handed the slip of paper to Hjelm.

  “Thanks. How was he as a writer?”

  Möller considered this question quietly. “He was one of the country’s leading literary critics. An author could rise or fall on what he wrote. His byline on a piece always gave it a certain … aura. A superb and versatile critic, who didn’t hesitate to be tough. And an underrated author.”

  “He wrote books too?”

  “Not recently, but there are a few gems from the seventies.”

  “I skimmed some old arts and leisure sections out there and found several of his pieces. He didn’t seem to like literature very much.”

  Möller rubbed his beard and peered through the window at the pale blue sky. “Literature today is beneath contempt,” he said at last. “Positively beneath it. The young authors have completely misunderstood their vocation. In general, we don’t write very much about literature anymore.”

  “No, I saw that you prioritize reporting on society and film festivals and interviews with rock bands and official speeches at awards ceremonies and conflicts within various bureaucratic organizations.”

  Möller thrust himself forward, over the desk, and his eyes drilled into Hjelm’s. “And what are you? A critic?”

  “More like a bit surprised.” Hjelm paged through his notebook. “I found an article in which a critic writes that critics read far too many books and that they ought to jog instead.”

  “Life is more than books.”

  “Well, that’s certainly a truism. If I were to claim that I would be a better police officer if I spent less time on police work, that would be a breach of duty. Then there was an article about how authors today devote far too much time to sitting and pondering the mystery of life. I thought that was the whole point.”

  “It’s clear that you know very little about this business,” Möller muttered, staring out the window.

  “And you write that the young ones are a gang of anemic navel-gazers without direction. Here are some quotes from Lars-Erik Hassel’s pieces: ‘The question is if it’s possible to get very much more out of literature.’ ‘Poetry
and the visual arts alike seem to have had their day.’ ‘The great account of the present day that we were all waiting for never came; this is the tragic nature of literature.’ ‘Poetry seems to be nothing more than a game.’ ‘Literature has long been the most overrated art form of our time.’ ”

  When no response came from Möller, it was Hjelm’s turn to thrust himself across the desk. “Was it not the case that one of Sweden’s most influential literary critics didn’t like literature at all?”

  Möller’s gaze was stuck up among the nonexistent clouds. He was gone. His exhaustion seemed monumental. It extended right into the next life.

  Because he didn’t have much more to add, and because Möller was unlikely to lift a finger in the next half-hour, Hjelm decided to leave this site of human catastrophe. He stepped out into the editorial office and closed the door on the fossilized chief editor.

  He walked over to the young man with the pecked-out obituary. He had stopped pecking and was now reading through the text on his monitor.

  “Is it finished?” Hjelm asked.

  The man gave a start, as though a dumdum bullet had hit him and torn him in two. “Oh, sorry,” he panted, once he collected himself. “Yes, it’s finished. As finished as it can be, under the circumstances.”

  “May I have a copy?”

  “It will be in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “I would like to have it now, if it’s possible.”

  The man looked at him with surprise. “Of course.” He pressed a key, and a laser printer expelled sheets of paper. “It’s always a pleasure to be read.”

  Hjelm skimmed through the text, which was signed Erik Bertilsson.

  “In accordance with all the rules of the genre,” said Bertilsson.

  Hjelm peered up from the paper and zeroed in on him. “Rather than those of the truth?”

  Erik Bertilsson got what was, to an experienced interrogator, a very familiar now-I’ve-said-too-much look and fell silent.

  “What kind of writer was Hassel, actually?” Hjelm said. “I’ve read a few rather strange pieces.”

  “Read the obituary,” said Bertilsson resolutely. “All I have to say is there.”

  Hjelm looked around the editorial office. Isolated staff members were running around. No one seemed to be taking any notice of the police visit.

  “Listen carefully, Erik,” he said sharply. “I’m only trying to get an accurate picture of a murder victim. Any information that can contribute to the capture of the killer is of the utmost importance. What you say will stay within the investigation. It’s not a matter of slandering someone publicly.”

  “Let’s go to the stairs,” Bertilsson sighed, standing up heavily.

  They got to the empty stairwell.

  Bertilsson squirmed as though he were standing in the flames of hell. After a moment he came to a decision, released his discomfort, and let out the ballast, a heavy chunk of frustration.

  “It was an assignment to write this obituary, not my choice,” he said with a glance over his shoulder. “And I’ve never felt like such a hypocrite. Hassel was part of Möller’s inner circle. They’re the ones who make the decisions, quite simply, a clique from the same generation and with the same values, which they think are the same ones as in the golden sixties but in fact are the diametrical opposite. They rabidly try to ring in the sign of the times, and they happily follow the shallowest trends, but their willingness to let outsiders into their inner circle is nonexistent. Hassel had power. He was allowed to write about whatever books he wanted, and he always chose things he didn’t understand, just so he could cut those authors off at the knees. All his aesthetic convictions date back to the sixties, and they’re based on the pretense that literature is, by definition, fraud. He wrote a theoretical Maoist manifesto and a few documentary novels in the seventies, but since then all his work has been based on raking people over the coals. It’s almost impossible to count the promising authors he’s single-handedly sunk.”

  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.

  7

  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?