What the unit needed was a robust serial killer. Of a robust international character.
Paul Hjelm, staring stupidly and motionlessly at the motionless morning, watched a small leaf, one of the few that was yellow, quiver and flutter to the courtyard’s dreary concrete. He gave a start, as though it forewarned a hurricane, and his start goaded him to pull himself together. He strode over to a flaking shaving mirror that was nailed to the wall in the generic office-and contemplated his blemish.
During the hunt for the Power Murderer, a red spot had broken out on his cheek, and someone very close to him had said that the blemish looked like a heart. That had been a long time ago. She was no longer close to him, and the person who had taken her place mostly thought it repulsive.
He looked back at the time of the Power Murders case with sadness and a sense of unreality. The case had brought a peculiar mix of professional success and personal disaster. And renewal, painful in the way renewal is always painful.
His wife, Cilla, had left him. In the middle of one of the country’s most important murder investigations ever, he had ended up alone with the children out in the row house in Norsborg. This meant that the children had to drift around by themselves while he was sucked deeper and deeper into the case and found double-edged erotic relief with a colleague. He still had trouble separating what had actually happened between them from what he had imagined.
But once the case was solved, the train of life returned to its customary rails, as he had put it in poetic moments. One car after another was pulled in from its sidetrack and resumed its place on the main track until the Hjelm train was once again its old self. Cilla returned; family life went back to normal; the A-Unit, and not least himself, were declared heroes; the group was made permanent; he was promoted and was assigned regular working hours; a few of his colleagues became close friends; the female colleague found a new man; peace and quiet returned; and everything was fine and dandy.
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.”