Mats Berggren had done some research on his new partner before their first meeting. He hadn’t needed to go any further than the details in the police’s own database.
Caroline Thurn was born on February 16, 1977, meaning she was thirty-two years old. Berggren couldn’t see where she had grown up or gone to school, but she must have enrolled in the police training academy straight after high school, because she had been given a position with the Stockholm police force as early as autumn 1998. After that first year on the beat, she was recruited to a group that had been given a good deal of media coverage back then, part of an international exchange. Berggren remembered it well; his own application to the program had been unsuccessful.
That initial year abroad had turned into several for Caroline Thurn, but in 2005, she had moved back to the National Criminal Police, and after that there was no information about exactly what she had been doing. Berggren had needed only to ask a couple of his new colleagues in the department for the picture to emerge: Caroline Thurn was someone who worked day in and day out, and who couldn’t handle failure. Still, Berggren was congratulated by everyone he asked. Thurn was the kind of person you wanted on your side.
The first time they met, Mats Berggren had been shocked. After everything he had heard and read about her, the tall, slim woman wasn’t at all what he had been expecting. Her profile, with that narrow, beaklike nose and those high cheekbones, was certainly razor sharp, but Thurn turned out to be both warm and empathetic. Berggren would even go as far as to say soft.
He took a step into the room off the hallway.
“Have you just moved in?” he asked.
The suite of five rooms stretched along Strandvägen, a street that was home to Stockholm’s rich and powerful, with views out onto the whole of Nybroviken and Blasieholmen on the other side of the water. There was no furniture, no rugs, pictures or curtains, just creaking wooden floors.
“Mmm,” she eventually said, “my parents bought this place just after the war. I… haven’t got round to dealing with the decoration yet.”
“Haven’t got round to it?” Berggren said, going over to the window. “Which war are we talking about?”
“I have a sofa where you can sleep,” she replied, waving him away from the view out onto the calm waters.
They passed through another couple of empty rooms on the way into a smaller room with a door. Inside, there was a deep, worn sofa.
“Do you live alone?” Berggren asked.
Men had long since fulfilled their role in Caroline Thurn’s life. That wasn’t a bitter fact, she assumed her experience of relationships was no different from other people’s. Still, she had made the decision to live on her own. She didn’t like talking about it. In other people’s eyes, choosing to live alone took on political or philosophical dimensions.
Instead of replying to Berggren’s question, she said,
“Get a few hours’ sleep. You need it.”
“Looks comfy.” Berggren nodded toward the sofa, suddenly remembering how tired he was.
She smiled. “You can make coffee in the kitchen when you wake up,” she said. “I don’t have much china, but if you can’t find anything you can wash one of the cups in the dishwasher.”
If I can find the kitchen, Berggren thought.
He had grown up with his parents in a small apartment on Hantverkargatan in fifties and sixties Stockholm, back when the city had been full of hope for the future and what would later come to be called “honest hard work.” His childhood had been a struggle. Being fat had meant he was always an outsider. He hadn’t played sports, never got invited to parties. His ambitions had always been bigger than his abilities, which meant that his schoolwork had been one long torment. He had inherited his pathos, his passion for solidarity and justice, from his father, a metalworker who had moved to Stockholm from Falun. From his mother, the academic from Kungsholmen, he had learned that a just, democratic society had to be built on the principle of equality in the eyes of the law. From both of them, he had learned not to believe that he was better than anyone else. He had always known he would be a police officer, and the one time in his life he had managed to shed some of his excess weight for a few months was ahead of his entrance examination to the National Police Academy.
But he had never lived anywhere bigger than that childhood apartment.
“How many square feet is this place?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.
“More than I need,” Thurn replied. “You’ll be OK?”
“What?” he asked. “Are you… leaving?”
“I just remembered something,” she said. “I wanted to check if there was some other way into that building on Karlavägen. Through the building next door, or the garage. We never checked.”
“Now?” Berggren was taken aback.
“I don’t need much sleep. You get some though.”
Berggren knew he should protest, but he didn’t have the energy. Instead, he nodded and lay down on the sofa, which was even more comfortable than he could have imagined. He fell asleep immediately.
25
During the Second World War, Montenegro’s capital had been flattened by the sixty or more bombing raids the city was subjected to. It sounds absurd, some kind of gross overexaggeration of Podgorica’s importance, but that was how many times the bombers had swept into the beautiful valley and unloaded their cargo, an evil rain, onto the once pretty town where the two rivers met.
By the end of the war, there was nothing left.
When the Communist Party got to work rebuilding the city during the fifties and sixties, it did so following the same model as everywhere else in the new Eastern Europe: it created a kind of budget variant of brutalist modernism. Like Stockholm, Podgorica became a city where the buildings were never allowed to be taller than five or six stories. But unlike Stockholm, Podgorica became homogeneous, planned, cheap and soulless.
Filip Zivic, the helicopter pilot, loved Podgorica, but not because of the city’s beauty. Lots of positive things had happened to the overall look of the town over the past twenty years, but Zivic would play no part in how it continued to develop over the next few decades.
It was with sorrow in his heart that he loaded his bags into the trunk of his car.
“Shall we go?” his wife asked. She was already sitting in the passenger’s seat.
Their son was in the back, focused on some kind of game on his phone. As far as the boy was concerned, there was no real difference between Montenegro and Serbia, and the thought made Filip Zivic all the more depressed.
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The Serbian justice minister, Nebojsa Have, assumed that the meeting straight after lunch would involve a new negotiation of some kind. But unlike the other meetings he suffered through during his long days in the government offices at Nemanjina 11, a beautiful corner building, he wouldn’t have to conceal it. He was a minister in a Serbian government that, beneath the surface, sprawled in all directions and built on compromises.
He heard a knock at the door, and a moment later one of his secretaries appeared, a young man with a straight back and ambition in his eyes.
“Filip Zivic is here to see you,” he said.
“Good,” said Have. “Ask him to come in.”
Have knew what kind of impression his office gave to someone visiting for the first time. Ceilings almost thirteen feet high, with decorative stucco, tall windows out onto the street and heavy, pale velvet curtains. He had a cluster of antique armchairs and a glittering crystal chandelier above a coffee table, and the walls were covered in oil paintings of famous Serbian men. It was impossible not to be impressed.