Should she bring in Rosenberg? He was most likely the weakest link. He associated with Slobodan and was familiar with Lorenzo Wader, which was interesting for their colleagues in both Stockholm and Västerås.
She was interrupted in her train of thought by Ottosson. He stepped into her office after a short knock on the door.
“I have bad news,” he said. “Berglund isn’t doing so well.”
Lindell saw his hesitation. She wanted everything to be fine with Berglund, and did not want to hear anything else.
“He has a brain tumor.”
“No!” Lindell exclaimed. “That’s not true!”
“They’ve done one of those scans,” Ottosson said, and proceeded with an account of what he knew.
He kept speaking somewhat disjointedly because the alternative was silence. Lindell listened, and the tears started to run down her cheeks. She mechanically wiped them away. Ottosson finished.
“What happens now?”
“He has an operation on Monday,” Ottosson said.
“Have you talked to him? How is he taking it?”
Ottosson nodded.
“You know how he is. He said to say hello.”
The thoughts surrounding the case, which for several minutes had filled her with optimism and a desire to act, suddenly appeared meaningless. Berglund was her favorite, her mentor, and her walking encyclopedia regarding policework and a general knowledge of Uppsala. Everything would seem meaningless if Berglund was no longer part of their unit.
“Berglund,” Lindell mumbled, and the tears started to flow again.
“We’ll have to hope for the best,” Ottosson said.
She saw that he wanted to say something comforting, as he was always prepared to do, but a brain tumor was a disease of such gravity that not even Ottosson could find words of encouragement.
Once Ottosson had left Lindell’s office, with some reluctance, she remained at her desk, reflective but distracted from all policework. The whole time she saw Berglund before her, his cunning smile, his laughter and the eagerness he could display when he saw interest and understanding in the person he was talking to. She caught herself already regarding him as dead and buried.
It took an hour before she got anything done. She called Beatrice and asked if she could bring in Konrad Rosenberg the following morning.
Haver returned shortly after three. Lindell let him talk, lacking the energy to jump in and tell him about Berglund. He would find out in due course. She remembered a conversation from the lunchroom recently when Berglund had talked about “Sture with the hat” and Rosenberg. Haver’s tone then had been superior, bordering on condescension.
Finally, he left to go down to the garage and join the technicians in examining Armas’s car, and Lindell was happy to be left alone.
Her peace did not last long, however. Sammy Nilsson walked in without knocking and she was on the verge of blasting him for his annoying habit, but then immediately noticed from his expression that he had something important to tell her.
“An escape from the Norrtälje prison this morning,” he started, in his usual abbreviated way. “Four men got out, with armed threats and hostage-taking.”
Lindell stared at him. A break-out in Norrtälje only indirectly involved law enforcement in Uppsala, and was above all a matter for the patrol units and criminal information service.
“One of the guys is of interest,” Nilsson went on. “He’s Mexican.”
Lindell became attentive.
“His name is Patricio Alavez and he was sentenced for illegal trafficking, that is to say, drugs.”
“Cocaine?”
“Yes,” Sammy Nilsson said smugly.
What a day, Lindell thought. Absolutely nothing one week, and then the information starts to rain down on us.
“I heard Johansson, you know that lug of a guy from Storvreta, talk about it down at the communications headquarters. When he said Mexico, my ears perked up.”
“Any traces? Is the hostage-”
“As if swallowed up by the earth. There is some information on a car, most likely an Audi, that drove through Kårsta at high speed, but it hasn’t yielded anything so far.”
“Mexico,” Lindell said. “We’re going to have to take this fucking nice and easy.”
Sammy Nilsson looked at her, at first with surprise, then amusement. Lindell cursed very infrequently.
“I am calm,” he said. “I’m fucking calm.”
Like Lindell, he sensed that they were closing in. She continued her line of reasoning, but without really turning to Sammy. It became a monologue where she was trying to connect all the threads. Connections between the stabbing of Sidström in Sävja, cocaine, and Rosenberg. Nilsson could not clearly see the connections between these events and Slobodan Andersson and Dakar, and he interrupted her. Lindell looked somewhat taken aback, but then told him about Barbro Liljendahl’s case and speculations.
“That’s a lot of arrows,” he said.
He had seen her open notebook on the desk.
“I’ve asked Bea to bring in Rosenberg tomorrow morning, but the question is if we shouldn’t do it right away. And we have to get in touch with Västerås and Stockholm.”
“Why?”
Lindell realized that she hadn’t told him about her visit to Dakar, and she suddenly felt very embarrassed, but Sammy Nilsson simply waved away her explanations about having had too much to do.
“I’ll go with Bea to track down Rosenberg,” Sammy said. “You take on the Stockholm colleagues who are working on this jewel, what’s his name? Lorenzo? Otto will have to check to see if there is more news on the escape. I looked in on him just now but he was just staring into space like some zombie.”
Lindell knew why, but did not want to say anything to Sammy Nilsson and take the edge off his enthusiasm.
“Sounds like a plan,” she simply said, and reached for the phone. “I’ll call Bea back.”
Fifty-One
Zero nurtured a dream of moving back to Kurdistan, the land that his father had described so many times. There were those who said that Kurdistan was only a dream, which made Zero laughed. When he was in the seventh grade, the teacher had said that this land did not exist. That made Zero angry. That was the time when Zero put up his hand and asked when they were going to read about Kurdistan. After all, they had to study all the other countries, rivers, and mountain ranges.
“How can a land that exists not exist?” he had asked the teacher.
“I’m afraid that I don’t understand the question. We have to keep to…”
Maybe the teacher was convinced that Zero, who otherwise never raised his hand, was trying to mess with him, to cause trouble and confusion.
Zero stood up from his seat and walked out. Zero’s father was at home, reading. Zero asked him if the country existed. His father lowered the paper and looked at him.
“In here,” he said and thumped his chest, “Kurdistan is in here. If God wills it, we will move there and build a home. If we can only follow our hearts, I will drive a bus in Kurdistan.”
He drove a bus in Sweden, most often route 13.
“That is my lucky number,” he said, and laughed.
He could not understand the Swedes, a superstitious and unmodern people, and their fear of numbers. He loved buses, and liked to drive route 13.
Zero was afraid. It was a feeling he had more often now. Mostly he was afraid his father would not make it back from Turkey. At night he dreamed that he rescued his father from prison. He would drive a bus up close to the prison wall, on which his father and his friends had climbed, and then they jumped down into the seats on the bus. When it was full, Zero drove the sixty or so Kurds to freedom. His father sat up at the very front and told him how to drive, pointing to the right and to the left, but never with irritation. His father glowed with pride and he turned to his friends, pointed to the driver, and said that it was his son who was driving. Not his oldest son, admittedly, but his bravest.