Arto Söderstedt’s Great-Uncle Pertti Lindrot had been an enthusiastic young provincial doctor who found himself drawn into the Finnish Winter War after the abrupt attack by the Soviet forces. He turned out to have a great aptitude for guerrilla warfare in the winter forests and quickly climbed the ranks. He became a hero after several decisive offences and disappeared without a trace after the Russian victory. According to his own version of events, he had gone out into the Finnish forests like a classic guerrilla fighter. He returned after the war, more or less a broken man. Drank more and more and had trouble keeping his job as a doctor in a variety of increasingly remote backwaters, before eventually returning to Vasa and becoming an eccentric, living that sad life until he turned ninety.
Now Arto Söderstedt knew what Uncle Pertti had really been up to after the Russian victory in the Finnish Winter War.
The young provincial doctor had become an SS officer.
He had been one of those responsible for the Pain Centre in Weimar, and he looked very, very similar to his great-nephew.
Uncle Pertti hadn’t liked it. Tormentor number 1, according to Paul Hjelm’s notes, had been: ‘Very blond, not-German, sorrowful.’ Leonard Sheinkman’s words prior to death: ‘The kindest of them. He is less German than I, and very blond. He looks so sorrowful. He kills with sorrow in his eyes.’
Uncle Pertti hadn’t liked it, but he had taken the dental gold all the same. And then he had moved on.
Arto Söderstedt had built his Tuscan paradise on a foundation of stolen Jewish dental gold.
He felt his face turn pale.
His paradise had been paid for with the teeth of hundreds of murdered Leonard Sheinkmans.
He had no choice but to run to the plane toilet and throw up. There seemed to be bucketfuls of the stuff. He vomited his disgust, his dread, his regret, his entire ruined conscience.
I’m trampling on their bodies, his vomit screamed. I’m trampling on their bodies to keep my head up above the shit. I can smell the stench, it roared, I can smell the stench and I’m looking out towards the horizon and pretending I think it’s beautiful and that it smells of seventeen kinds of basil rather than shit and death and bodies.
But suddenly, the feeling of defeat was transformed. Whatever was rising in him was no longer the bile of self-contempt. It was no longer horror at Uncle Pertti’s transformation from war hero to torturer and murderer. It was no longer the repulsion of having a war criminal’s – a Nazi’s – evil blood coursing through his veins. It was no longer the nausea of having used the war criminal’s stolen money.
It was rage.
Pure, simple rage, directed at one person and one person only.
Hans von Heilberg, also known as Marco di Spinelli.
Arto Söderstedt returned to his seat. A moment of turbulence shook the plane.
But the shaking was all his own.
He glanced at his computer screen. On it was a drawing. A drawing of a palace. Through it, a pale, crooked line snaked.
He would bring di Spinelli to account.
It was that simple.
He thought back to his last meeting with Commissioner Italo Marconi. It had ended oddly.
The commissioner had completed his meandering line, twisting this way and that across the drawing. It looked like a child’s shaky pencil line on a comic-book labyrinth. Söderstedt had asked: ‘What do you think Marco di Spinelli did during the war?’
Marconi had put down the pen and fixed his Nordic colleague with his eyes.
‘It’s obvious,’ he had said. ‘He was a Nazi.’
Söderstedt had stared back at him, nodded slowly and said: ‘My God, Italo. You want me to get to him.’
‘I want you to find out who he really is, yes. You might have more luck than I’ve had, Arto, with new starting points and fewer rigid restrictions.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Söderstedt had replied. ‘You want me to go in via that route.’
Marconi had given him a very quick glance, rubbed his enormous moustache and said, his fingers drumming the drawing: ‘Theoretically – and I’m only talking theoretically here – it’s a classic one-man job. You go in through a vent in the garbage room. That vent opens out onto an alley behind the palace. They empty the rubbish through that vent once a week, using a vacuum pump. The cover on the vent, it’s locked with a strong padlock. And you would need to be quick, you would have to move in a very specific way, because the cameras on the opposite wall move in a fixed pattern.’
‘It sounds completely impenetrable,’ Söderstedt had said.
‘It would be,’ Marconi had replied, ‘if you didn’t know the movements, weren’t familiar with the time frames and didn’t have access to a newly copied key.’
A brown envelope had been placed on the table; it jingled slightly. Söderstedt had looked suspiciously at it.
‘Are you really planning on sticking a blue-eyed Swedish policeman’s head into the mouth of the lion in cold blood?’
‘That was a lot of clichés in one sentence,’ Italo Marconi had said with a faint, practically undetectable smile.
‘Go on,’ Arto Söderstedt had replied, his face unmoving.
‘It’s easier once you’re inside the garbage room. You’re out of the security cameras’ sight anyway. The rubbish is thrown out from three locations within the palace and comes tumbling down into the rubbish bins through wide shafts.’
‘So let me see if I understand, purely theoretically of course. The rubbish bin, it’s covered with a lid?’
‘Absolutely correct. A lid with four tubes coming out of it. The rubbish gets sucked out into the alleyway through one of them; that’s the one you use to get in. That way, you’ll end up in the covered rubbish bin.’
‘The covered, stinking, pitch-black rubbish bin.’
‘I can’t do anything about the stench and the lid, I’m afraid. But a torch solves the problem of it being dark. When you get into the container, there are three pipes leading up, via three different shafts, to different places inside the palace. The closest of them goes to the kitchen, and that’s much too far from the heart of things. The furthest leads to the drawing room of the great hall, and that’s too far away as well – albeit in the other direction. The middle shaft, though, it goes to a little kitchenette belonging to di Spinelli’s most private rooms. His three personal guards know about it – you’ve met them already – and possibly his private secretary.’
‘The one with the glasses,’ Söderstedt had said.
‘Exactly,’ Marconi had unexpectedly replied. ‘Marco di Spinelli’s secret rooms are where he has had prostitutes all these years. His love nest. Other than through the kitchenette, there’s just one door leading to the love nest, and that faces out onto his office.’
‘I only saw one door in his office and it led to his private secretary’s room. The one I came in through.’
‘This door is behind the sixteenth-century tapestries.’
‘And to get there, you have to climb up thirty metres from the rubbish bin?’
‘Seven,’ Italo Marconi had said. ‘Seven metres straight up, plus ten or so on a slant at the beginning and the end. Purely theoretically, I’d recommend strong climbing shoes and a thick jumper with reinforced elbows. The lid to the garbage shoot needs to be opened from the inside with a monkey wrench.’
‘And what the hell do I do then?’
‘You?’ Marconi had asked, staring at Söderstedt. ‘Who the hell mentioned you?’
He had paused and sighed before continuing.
‘You’ve managed to do something that no one else has in a long time. You’ve knocked Marco di Spinelli off balance. I don’t know how you did it, but you did. We have to stir things up, and you could be just the thing we’ve been waiting for. Purely theoretically, that is.’
‘What about the Erinyes?’
‘Well, yes. They’re still a much more abstract thing for us. Maybe you can throw a spanner in their plans, too.’