“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.