‘Does it say anything about his nose?’ Söderstedt asked.
‘His missing nose,’ Svitlytjnyj said, getting to his feet; it took him almost thirty seconds. ‘Might I suggest we carry on in the computer room?’
A mystery, Söderstedt thought. The minuscule cigarette had disappeared without a trace. In its place was a freshly rolled, newly lit cigarette. The switch had taken place without him, the seasoned Finnish-Swedish detective, noticing a thing.
‘You’ve got a computer room?’ he asked distractedly, getting up.
Svitlytjnyj chuckled and took a long drag.
‘You weren’t expecting that, were you?’ he said.
They went out into the corridor and wandered through all eternity.
‘We’re busy transferring the old archive over to the new computer system,’ the commissioner said. ‘And taking the opportunity to translate it all into English. It takes time. We’re up to “L”. You’re in luck.’
‘What about the nose?’ Söderstedt persisted.
‘The missing nose,’ Svitlytjnyj persisted, opening a door.
The room they entered was a hackers’ paradise. All the computers seemed to be the latest possible models. Several men and women were tapping away at keys on trendy, lightning-fast terminals. The impression it gave was more American stock-market company than Ukrainian police department.
‘You look a bit dumbfounded,’ Svitlytjnyj said with a smile.
‘How can you afford all this?’ Söderstedt blurted out undiplomatically.
‘Mafia money,’ the commissioner said with a straight face.
Several others in the room burst into laughter.
‘Let me brief you,’ Svitlytjnyj continued. And so, in peace and quiet – and in perfect English – Arto Söderstedt read the files on Franz Kouzmin.
His twelve-year-old daughter, who had been living in an orphanage at the time, had reported him missing at the end of September, when she had gone for her monthly visit. His wife had died of cancer just two years after the daughter was born, and when his alcoholism worsened, she had been taken away and placed into an orphanage. There were excerpts from an interview with her.
‘Dad had just stopped drinking,’ she had said. ‘He’d been completely clean for a month. And really, really happy.’ Though she had no idea why.
OK, Söderstedt thought, checking himself. Kouzmin stopped drinking and was happy, expectant. Like a man going on a trip. A trip to Sweden. He had clearly found something, and that something made him fight a long-standing alcohol problem and board the M/S Cosmopolit, bound for Frihamnen in Stockholm.
He read on.
Suddenly, the nose question was solved. He should have guessed. They all should have.
Franz Kouzmin had been adopted by a Ukrainian woman who had taken care of him in Buchenwald, where his parents had died. He had been subjected to a medical experiment related to breathing. An investigation into how important the airways in the nose were for the human ability to breathe.
To answer that question, the SS doctors in Buchenwald had sawn off little Franz’s nose.
It turned out it was possible to live without one.
Good to know.
Things had become more difficult for him later on in life. But if someone had sawn off my nose, Arto Söderstedt thought, I probably would have turned to alcohol too.
And then he found it.
A name.
He phoned Stockholm.
Jan-Olov Hultin answered. He said: ‘I was just about to ring you, Arto. You’ve got to go to Weimar.’
Arto Söderstedt simply ignored him.
‘Listen carefully to what I’m about to say,’ he said, focusing on the computer screen in front of him.
‘I’m listening,’ said Hultin.
‘Our man without a nose, “Shtayf” from Södra Begravningsplatsen, was called Franz Kouzmin. That wasn’t his birth name, though. He was born to a Jewish home in Berlin in January 1935. His name was Franz Sheinkman.’
There was silence at the other end of the line.
‘My God,’ said Hultin.
‘You could say that,’ said Söderstedt.
‘Tell me more.’
‘He was a widower and an alcoholic and had just stopped drinking. He crept out of the Soviet Union in good spirits and set off to Sweden, or more precisely to his father Leonard Sheinkman’s house on Bofinksvägen in Tyresö. Somehow, he’d managed to find out where his father was living. It was enough to make him stop drinking. His father thought Franz was dead – dead along with his wife in Buchenwald. But that’s not what happened. He wasn’t killed, he was subjected to medical experiments; they deliberately sawed his nose off. So, on the evening of the fourth of September 1981, he arrived at his father’s house on Bofinksvägen. We don’t know what happened when they met, but what we do know is that the very same evening, he was stabbed to death and found next to a little lake nearby.’
‘I see,’ said Hultin.
‘You see what?’
‘That you’ve done a fantastic job. Can you send the files over? Will they allow that?’
‘I think so,’ Söderstedt said, glancing up at the great Alexej Svitlytjnyj. His cigarette was tiny once more, but Söderstedt was forced to admit that he had lost interest in it.
‘You can go to Weimar now then,’ said Hultin. ‘You need to meet a Professor Ernst Herschel from the history department at the University of Jena. Get there as quickly as you can. We can deal with any further instructions on the way.’
‘Give me a hint,’ Söderstedt pleaded.
‘The institution where the nail in the brain experiment was developed.’
‘Ah,’ Söderstedt replied, hanging up.
Svitlytjnyj sucked the microscopic cigarette butt into his mouth, quickly doused it with a little pooled spit, spat it out and had another immediately ready rolled. He lit it as he leaned forward over the computer and helped Arto Söderstedt navigate the Cyrillic letters on-screen.
And just like that, Franz Kouzmin-Sheinkman’s files were sent flying across Europe.
Söderstedt wondered whether he hadn’t simply been asked to come to Odessa to admire their computers and spread a little goodwill among the Common European police community.
He said: ‘I need to copy the files for my own use, too.’
He was handed a disk and the computer asked him: ‘Save Kouzmin?’
‘Yes,’ he answered. With emphasis.
34
ANTON ERIKSSON WAS born in 1913, in a small town called Örbyhus to the north of Stockholm. At the age of twenty, he enrolled as a student at the university in Uppsala and, after reading a range of subjects including medicine, German and anthropology, transferred to the grand old university town’s most famous independent institution: the State Institute for Racial Biology. The institution had been founded in 1922, the very same year the Swedish Social Democrats had recommended the forced sterilisation of mentally handicapped people on the basis of ‘the eugenic dangers inherent in the reproduction of the feeble-minded’. It was the world’s first institution for the study of eugenics and later served as a standard for Kaiser Wilhelm’s Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Eugenics was, in turn, an important precondition for the Holocaust. Though its roots were, of course, much deeper. The early twentieth century had been a time of great change – Sweden was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial society – and in times of upheaval, the need for a scapegoat always arises. The Jews were an obvious choice, since they could just as easily be accused of bolshevism as of capitalism and anti-patriotism – it was simply a matter of choosing which.