He had arrived in Sweden and completed his language learning in record time – hardly surprising, considering it was his mother tongue. He had also completed his medical education in record time – again, hardly surprising, considering he was already a doctor. He had then become a brain scientist in record time – hardly surprising, considering he had already been experimenting on human brains. And no one had recognised him. He had made it. He had completed his metamorphosis and was now living as a Jew. He went to the synagogue, observed the Sabbath, Passover, Sukkot, Hanukkah and Yom Kippur, and he married a Jewish woman.
The Nazi had started a Jewish family.
None of this needed expressing.
But one thing did:
‘How could he live with it?’
They looked at one another.
‘I don’t think he could,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘I think he deliberately trained himself to block it all out. I think that Anton Eriksson actually became Leonard Sheinkman. I think he even managed to talk himself into thinking he had written that diary.’
‘But he was reminded of his past twice,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘The first time was on the fourth of September 1981. He was nearly seventy by that point, when a newly sober Ukrainian Jew without a nose appeared on the threshold of that lovely house on Bofinksvägen, beaming with joy and claiming to be his son. It was madness. He killed him with a kitchen knife. Two brutal stabs, representing the power of his actions, the entire scope of it all. He took the body out into the woods and dumped it by a nearby lake.’
‘The second time was when he felt the presence of the Erinyes,’ Paul Hjelm continued. ‘That was when it all came back with a vengeance. He was forced to turn the page again. He was forced to read the back of the paper, the side he thought he had wiped clean. It was enough to make him visit Franz Sheinkman’s anonymous grave – “Shtayf”. The gravestone had been kicked over, and by neo-Nazis. It must have felt quite ironic. And just then, while he was at the grave, the Erinyes appeared. The goddesses of revenge from the depths of antiquity. Before they killed him using the very same method he himself had used on countless others in the Pain Centre in Weimar, he talked to them. He had probably been confronted by the weight of his guilt by that point and said something along the lines of “finally” or “you took your time”. Just like Nikos Voultsos in Skansen, he took them for real goddesses of revenge. Real Erinyes.’
In both cases, there had been plenty to be avenged.
‘That still leaves the question of what these two examples of revenge have in common. The prostitutes’ revenge on their pimps and the camp victims’ revenge on their tormentors. Where’s the link between them?’
‘We’ll have to see what Professor Herschel manages to scrape together in terms of names from Weimar,’ Paul Hjelm said.
They didn’t say much more after that.
Their words felt rather insignificant.
35
ARTO SÖDERSTEDT HAD always wanted to see Weimar. It was one of his private dreams, those that Uncle Pertti’s money would help him to realise. Some time in the not so distant future, he would make it there.
In other words, he hadn’t been expecting this sudden trip.
He was sitting on the train from Leipzig, where the plane from Odessa had taken him the night before. He had checked in to one Hotel Fürstenhof, fallen asleep without taking even a moment to enjoy the grand old beauty of the building, and hiccuped from pure shock when he was handed the bill by an exquisite blonde he hadn’t the heart to argue with. He paid compliantly and hoped that the National Criminal Police accountants wouldn’t make too much of a fuss about it. Or did he dare send the bill to Europol in The Hague?
After that, he had wandered along Tröndlinring, bathed in the formidable light of a mild, Central European spring morning, and jumped on board the train to Weimar which had just sped past the border between Saxony and Thuringia in the former GDR.
As places like Bad Kösen, Bad Sulza and Apolda went by, he read the latest message from Hultin, which he had paid a small fortune to the Hotel Fürstenhof in Leipzig to access online. Should the bill for that go to The Hague too? Where exactly did the Common European line for abuse of power lie?
He ignored that thought and started reading.
Leonard Sheinkman wasn’t Leonard Sheinkman.
He was a Swedish SS doctor by the name of Anton Eriksson.
Such was the poodle’s real core. As Goethe had written in Weimar.
Elsewhere in Faust, he had called Leipzig ‘little Paris’, and as the train pulled in to Weimar Hauptbahnhof, Leipzig was undeniably like a metropolis in comparison.
Weimar was nothing more than a tiny little provincial hole.
And yet the place had been European Capital of Culture just the year before. It had also celebrated the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth.
Still going strong.
A dark-haired woman in her early thirties was waiting on the platform. She was holding a handwritten sign reading ‘Herr Söderstadt’.
It was a step in the right direction, he thought, dragging his unnecessarily heavy luggage over to her and holding out his hand. She gave him a quick, sharp, shy look.
‘My name is Elena Basedow,’ she said in English, her voice unexpectedly deep. ‘I’m on Professor Herschel’s assistant staff.’
‘Arto Söderstedt,’ said Arto Söderstedt.
‘Not stadt?’ she asked, glancing at her handwritten sign.
‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘More of a small village.’
She smiled shyly. ‘Like Weimar,’ she said, gesturing with her hands.
‘Hopefully,’ Söderstedt replied awkwardly.
They set off. It was still a glorious Central European spring morning.
‘Staff?’ he asked. ‘Does the professor have many assistants?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Elena Basedow. ‘At the moment, we’re purely a research group. The assistants are PhD students. There used to be more of us.’
‘While you were researching the Pain Centre?’
‘Right. There were plenty of volunteer students, right up to autumn 1998. Unpaid history and archaeology students.’
‘Hmm,’ said Söderstedt.
They had reached an old Volkswagen Vento just outside the station. Elena Basedow opened the door for him and single-handedly lifted his unnecessarily heavy bag into the boot.
‘We’re going to go there first,’ she said, slamming the boot lid with such force that the car jumped. ‘He’s waiting for us there.’
Since her words seemed slightly cryptic, Söderstedt asked: ‘Where?’
‘To the Pain Centre. It’s been completely renovated now. An IT company took over the building without having any idea what happened there during the war. Not that they’d care…’
‘But you do,’ Söderstedt said as the car swung out from the station and began making its way towards the little town centre.
She gave him another quick, shy look.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do.’
‘You’re Jewish,’ said Söderstedt.
‘I’m a bit of everything,’ she replied. ‘I’m part descendant of the Rousseau-influenced eighteenth-century educationalist Johann Bernhard Basedow. Then I’m part Greek. And I’m part Jewish, yes.’
‘A mix of the best,’ Söderstedt said, feeling shockingly pure, racially speaking.
She gave him yet another of those quick, shy looks.
‘There it is,’ she said, pointing.
On a secluded little street to the north of the very heart of the town was a building which looked almost plastic, as though it had been iced, covered with a glistening sugary coat. Slightly beyond it, the hexagonal, newly renovated tower of Jakobskirche loomed.
‘I see time.’
From the cellar windows in the frosted building, the church tower would most likely be visible.