Even Viggo Norlander, whose task could once again be seen as suitable for a dunce, felt uplifted-which couldn’t be explained by his lingering conviction that his genes were, at this very moment, being perpetuated. Sure, he was being forced to spend the rest of the day with more or less desperate next of kin who would probably never find their loved ones, but even he was sucked into the slightly indefinable sphere of hope.
He stopped by his office to retrieve his trendy but slightly dirty-old-mannish leather jacket. Up until the Russian mafia had nailed him to the floor in Tallinn, he had always worn a pretty respectable civil-servant suit at work, and he had in general been a respectable police officer with faith in the system, the hierarchy of command, and the social order. He had been raised in a different world from the one he was part of now; this fact had become more and more obvious during the Power Murders, and it was that insight that had led him to take the desperate measure of setting aside all the order he’d had so much faith in and going alone to Estonia to solve the case. The stigmatization he had suffered there would never leave his extremities. The robust strikes of the hammer had emphatically ended the era of faith in his life. Never again would he trust anyone other than himself. And never again would he really trust himself. Instead he took refuge in sex, which had never seriously interested him; his potbelly, his bald spot, and his civil-servant suit all disappeared. He changed to polo shirts and the leather jacket he’d just fetched from the office.
His office mate, his former adversary Arto Söderstedt, had sat down at the computer, but his gaze was far off in the nasty fall weather. They were good friends these days, not least because they hadn’t the slightest thing in common and thought that excellent grounds for friendship. A little affirmative nod was enough, as Norlander picked up his leather jacket. He then made his way through the corridors and down to the garage under the police station, where his service Volvo was parked. He got behind the wheel and came out onto Bergsgatan, which closely resembled the Torne River just after the ice has melted. An autumn flood was streaming down toward Scheelegatan, but Norlander fought his way upstream toward Fridhemsplan so he could continue on toward Karolinska Hospital.
In the not-too-distant future, he would turn fifty. Nearly thirty years ago, he had been married for a few incredibly misery-tinged years; since then all relations with the opposite sex had lain fallow, only to bloom now, in a violent fifty-year-old’s crisis of uncritical one-night stands. Up until the night before, he had attributed it to repressed horniness; now he began to suspect that he was hearing the ticking of his biological clock. An endless line of forefathers extended back in time from him to Adam himself, and each of them was tapping on his successor’s shoulder, and the tapping was magnified into a demanding, biological tick-tock-tick-tock, and the line of men lifted their thunderous voices in unison and said, “Do not let it stop here. Do not break the line of descent. Do not be the last one.” And if he hadn’t even come close to thinking about being a father, not once, it was now the only thought that prevailed: he would become a father, he wanted to become a father, he had to become a father. And all because of that strange woman, almost his own age, who had swept into his bachelor pad on Banérgatan like a spring breeze, allowed herself to be fertilized, and disappeared out into the autumn storm. It had all happened in fifteen minutes. Now she was carrying his life inside her. About that, he was sure. The more he thought of it, the more certain he became that he had seen it in her even then.
The arrangement was ideal. His genes would live on, the line of men would cease tapping his shoulder-and he wouldn’t even have to take part in the difficulties of fatherhood. At most, he would be looked up by his Nobel Prize-winning son, who would suddenly realize where his exceptional gift had come from, and who would invest all his intelligence and a great deal of his enormous capital into contacting his father before he died so that he could fall to his knees and thank him for everything.
A honking truck brutally yanked him back to reality, or rather to the correct half of the street, just in time for him to make the turn to the pathology department at Karolinska, where the unknown body awaited his glorious arrival.
Viggo Norlander wandered through corridors that were much like those at the police station, made his way down to the notorious basement, and was welcomed by a none-too-warm nurse on penalty duty. There he stood before the legendary medical examiner Sigvard Strandell, a man of at least seventy-five, infinitely distinguished and infinitely slovenly-a combination that, within the medical profession, only researchers and pathologists could allow themselves to be; the risk that their patients would complain was minimal. Everyone called him Stranded; he had become stuck in this job as soon as he’d started. His specialty was hackneyed corpse jokes, one of which was immediately forthcoming: “Norlander, of all people. Are you here for a follow-up?”
“You know why I’m here,” Norlander said in a measured tone.
Strandell jangled a small plastic bag and its contents and handed it to Norlander. “His belongings. Traveled light, as they say. Otherwise I have nothing new to add. A sound and healthy young man, whose last meal probably consisted of hamburgers of the fattier sort. With honey on them, strangely enough. The death probably occurred between midnight and three in the morning; it’s not possible to be more exact. Four shots right into the heart and out again. Immediate death. His watch is still ticking, though-unfortunately.” He pointed at the plastic bag.
Norlander was shown to a spot next to a desk outside the cold chamber and supplied with copies of autopsy reports; there he awaited the visits from potential next of kin.
All together six of them showed up. First came an older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Johnsson, whose son-in-law had disappeared a few weeks earlier. Norlander’s papers said that the son-in-law had run off with the daughter’s not-insignificant fortune to Bahrain, where he had procured a harem that would have been a bit pricy to run, so the viewing was merely a formality.
The Johnssons’ faces went from hope to despair when they saw the dead man, and they shook their heads; nothing would have made them happier, it seemed, than to be reunited with their son-in-law in these environs.
It was with the Johnssons that Norlander saw the corpse for the first time. It lay there, in the ice-cold, stripped-bare room with refrigerator doors along the walls, and seemed to glow white in the horrid, naked fluorescent light. He was immediately struck by the ordinariness of the young man. He had not a single distinguishing feature. If someone were to draw a specific individual and send a copy into outer space with the Voyager as an example of a male Homo sapiens, this youngster would have been made for the role, thought Norlander with astonishment.
Next came a couple of experienced visitors whose sons had disappeared as small children in the 1970s. They had never given up hope and never made peace or accepted a fait accompli. Norlander shared their sorrow; their lifelong powerlessness and protracted grief moved him deeply.
Then came a long period of waiting. Norlander skimmed the difficult autopsy report and emptied the man’s possessions from the plastic bag. There were three things: a fake Rolex that, sure enough, was still keeping time; a long tube of ten-kronor coins; and a shiny key that seemed to have been made very recently. Nothing more. It told him nothing. And so it seemed quite fitting.
After that came two women, in quick succession, who had male family members who had disappeared the night before. First was Mrs. Emma Nilsson, whose junkie son was to have come home from detox but never showed up. Norlander could have told the middle-aged woman that the dead man wasn’t her son, but still he led her, with her prematurely crooked back, to the body. In the seconds while it was pulled out of its cooler box, fear was mirrored in the unfathomable darkness of her eyes. Once she saw the corpse and shook her head no, she seemed liberated, almost happy; there was still hope.