Fifteen months after the incident on Birger Jarlsgatan, Inspector Gustavsson had investigated twenty-five of the remaining four hundred ninety-six suspects on the hate-and-threat site. But that didn’t mean he was any closer to solving the murder mystery. For a new thread appeared early on, on the theme of ‘the goat-sex man got just what he deserved’. The result was three hundred new suspects.
‘Shouldn’t we close this case now?’ Gustavsson asked his boss.
‘No,’ said the superintendent.
He found it amusing to watch Gustavsson work.
Gustavsson’s predecessor, Christian Carlander, began his retirement days by doing two things. One: quitting his never-ending course in beginners’ Spanish, and two: finishing the García Márquez book he’d begun while he was still working on avoiding his job.
Those boxes ticked, life no longer had any purpose. Carlander realized that after One Hundred Years of Solitude he had to look forward to a hundred more. Or pull himself together.
He elected to do the latter and applied to a study group in Contemporary International Politics and Development. He didn’t know why that was the group he chose – perhaps because the educational association had squeezed it in between one about ceramics design and another about finding yourself through healing.
The group leader, a phlegmatic former social studies teacher from Örebro, couldn’t get a word in edgewise. The woman who took over was named Juanita; she was Spanish, divorced and had a fiery temperament.
From Spanish classes to a Spanish woman, Carlander thought. Someone up there had a sense of humour.
Juanita declared within the first few minutes of the first meeting that everything was going to hell. She based her argument on the man named Adolf, saying that what had once happened in Germany had nothing to do with the Germans, but that it would happen again and start somewhere else.
‘Again?’ said Carlander, mostly because he wanted Juanita to keep talking. She had beautiful lips, and they were even more beautiful when they were moving.
The phlegmatic leader tried to regain control, offering all due respect to what might have happened ninety years ago but saying that he wished to return the conversation to more recent times, and preferably the present.
‘Yes, again!’ said Juanita, as if the phlegmatic man didn’t exist. ‘There’s always a next time, for everything. People don’t remember any further back than their noses can reach!’
A beautiful nose, too, thought Carlander, trying to think of something to say that might prompt her to go on a little longer. But Juanita didn’t need his help.
‘Just take all the goddamned presidents.’
She rattled them off. There was the supposed leader of the free world who was whipping up ‘us-versus-them’ sentiments on Twitter. There was the one in the most populous country in the world who had declared that the most important function of art was to serve the nation and the party. There was the one who had taken over the country with the threatened rainforest and begun his term as president by shuttering the country’s ministry of culture and assigning a former porn star to watch over the nation’s cultural and moral attitudes.
‘Porn star?’ said the phlegmatic man, who had lost control of his group before he’d even tried to start having it.
But Juanita had already switched continents and arrived at the president of the allegedly democratic superpower who had created his own internet alongside the one that already existed.
‘Why?’ said Carlander, suspecting this was a dumb question.
He had to get hold of himself. Until very recently, his life had been over. Now he was sitting across from a woman so vivacious that the air seemed to crackle around her. What might happen if they had dinner together?
Juanita answered Carlander as she looked at the phlegmatic man.
‘So he can pull the plug on the real internet once the truth gets to be too much for him and his agenda.’
Carlander nodded. And tried to look deep. Whatever use that was, if the Spanish woman kept looking in a different direction.
‘It seems democracy as we know it is under threat.’
That didn’t sound so dumb!
Juanita moved on to Central Europe, where some were starting to rewrite their own histories, chase disapproving universities out of the country, rearrange their supreme courts, and supply films with warning labels if they didn’t live up to the government’s new, patriotic demands.
‘As if a film wasn’t fine art, but a pack of cigarettes,’ said Carlander.
Now she had discovered him!
The two other members of the group said nothing. The phlegmatic man felt steamrollered, but at least he had brought the conversation (or the monologue) into the present day.
‘Do you know what the worst part of all is, Börje?’ Juanita addressed the phlegmatic man.
‘My name is Bengt,’ he said.
Juanita had no time for details. She was far too eager to announce what the worst part of all was: Us-versus-them politics was spreading through the world like poison! Insignificant political parties that wanted to overthrow society, ones that no one had taken seriously before, were spiffing up their party platforms and helping themselves to power in this new zeitgeist. This way and that.
‘Soon they will have taken over entirely – mark my words – and then we’re back to the thirties! They start by censoring art, then architecture and the media, and soon enough everything else is just waiting its turn!’
By this point, Juanita’s cheeks were almost as red as her lips. Carlander thought they better hurry up and have dinner if she was right about the looming end of the world. He felt that he must, to this end, say at least one good thing before the leader brought this evening’s session to an end.
He searched inside himself and happened to think of the art dealer who had fallen victim to an evil jar of lingonberries the year before. What was her name again, the woman who had created the two paintings in his cellar?
‘That sounds dreadful,’ he said, just as he recalled her name. ‘A censored Irma Stern, for instance, would be a great loss for the world.’
Juanita’s agitation was derailed.
‘You know art?’
She had discovered him for real!
‘What would humanity be without it?’ Carlander said, figuring that he had a lot to read up on before their first dinner, should he manage to take things that far.
Juanita accepted the invitation as soon as his first attempt after the second study-group meeting.
After that came another dinner.
And yet another. With an overnight stay.
The Spanish woman was not all fire and politics. Her laugh was heaven-sent and she had a lust for life that Carlander had previously thought existed only in the movies. She laughed hardest of all when the former police inspector, before their third dinner, confessed that he could hardly even spell the word expressionism. All was fair in love and war, right? And in saying so, the coming war wasn’t foremost in his mind.
The study group met its demise when Börje, whose name was Bengt, stopped showing up, just like the two nameless members who never contributed to the conversation anyway. That left Carlander and Juanita. They decided to continue group-studying on their own, preferably in Carlander’s bedroom. After six weeks she said it for the first time, but not the last:
‘Te quiero.’ I love you.
‘El perro está bajo la mesa,’ Carlander replied.