Bad Blood: A Crime Novel (23 page)

The man with the golden helmet
, Chavez thought maliciously. The fake Rembrandt. Perhaps the most admired of the master’s paintings, and it turned out to have been done by an anonymous pupil.

He missed him already.

Then he gave a deep sigh, artfully poured the coffee while the hot water was still bubbling, and dove into the Volvo inferno.

The future was not his.

The nontime had passed. The hours that didn’t exist no longer existed. They landed at Newark in a broiling-hot noonday sun
that embraced the entire unending system of runways; from up in the sky, they had glittered in the sun like an inexperienced fly fisherman’s tangle of lines.

Paul and Kerstin hadn’t exchanged many words during the flight, not only because they had been contemplating the case; the disruptions in their relationship seemed to keep spreading—although neither of them thought much about it.

They were shepherded through passport control and had to wait more than half an hour for their luggage. After clearing customs, they finally entered the enormous arrivals hall, where a crowd of people were holding signs with the names of their unfamiliar arriving guests. After a few minutes, they realized that a sign in the hand of a tall suit-clad man, with the Lewis Carroll–inspired text “Yalm, Halm,” must be directed at them. The renowned comedy duo of Yalm & Halm politely greeted the gigantic man, whose name they made out as Jerry Schonbauer, and who shepherded them to a slightly calmer part of the arrivals hall.

Waiting there was an equally well dressed but slightly less stiff and slightly less FBI-like black man in his fifties. As the enormous Schonbauer took his place in the hierarchy just behind him, the black man extended his hand with a genuinely welcoming smile. “Ray Larner, FBI. You must be officers Yalm and Halm from Stockholm.”

“Paul Hjelm,” said Yalm.

“Kerstin Holm,” said Halm.

“So he’s started again now?” said Larner with a regretful smile. “A pair of fresh eyes is probably what this case needs.”

“It’s basically a matter of adding our information to your vast archive of knowledge,” said Kerstin with gently ingratiating humility.

Larner nodded. “As you know, I’ve devoted a great deal of my professional life to this character, and yet I still don’t know
what he’s up to. He is the most mysterious of all our serial killers. With most of them, you can come up with an approximate motive and psychological profile pretty quickly, but K deviates from almost all the usual norms. You will have seen my report, of course.”

They nodded. Larner called the Kentucky Killer “K,” as did the diehards in FASK, Fans of American Serial Killers, with whom Chavez had Internet contact. They shivered a joint shiver.

Jerry Schonbauer picked up their luggage, which hanging from his fists looked like toiletry bags. As they started walking, Larner asked them, “What do you say to the following schedule? We’ll drive you to the hotel so you can freshen up after your journey. Then we’ll have a late lunch at my favorite restaurant. And then we’ll start work. But first”—he nodded at Schonbauer, who was drifting with their bags toward an exit glimmering in the distance—“a little guided tour of Newark International Airport.”

Larner took them up the stairs to the check-in hall. They wandered for quite some time through an indoor landscape that never seemed to change; even the steady stream of travelers remained static.

Finally they stopped at a small door amid the sea of people. Larner pulled out a bunch of keys, slipped one in, and yanked it open. It was a janitor’s closet, large model: fluorescent lights on the low ceiling, clean, whitewashed floors, and shelves with meticulously arranged cleaning equipment—rags, brushes, buckets, towels. They made their way around the shelves to a more open area with a chair and a desk with a few old sandwiches on it. On the wall above was a tiny window through which one could see the giant bodies of arriving and departing planes sweeping past.

This was where Lars-Erik Hassel spent the last hour of his life.

And what an hour.

Hjelm and Holm looked around the closet. There wasn’t much to see. It was a clinical place in which to die a clinical death.

Larner pointed at the chair. “We’ve taken the original chair, of course. Aside from Mr. Hassel’s bodily fluids, there wasn’t a trace on it. There never is.”

“Never?” said Kerstin Holm.

“When we began, of course, there weren’t any real possibilities for DNA testing.” Larner shrugged. “But judging by the six murders in this new series, we probably weren’t missing anything. The closet is spotless. Like he’s superhuman. K.”

This last word was just a letter, but his tone took it to astronomical heights.

“Nine,” said Kerstin Holm.

Larner looked closely at her and nodded.

As they left the closet, Hjelm lingered for a few seconds in the open area. He wanted to be alone there. He sat in the chair and looked around. So sterile—such an American brand of sterile efficiency. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine just a tiny bit of the horrible, silent pain that these walls had encircled, tried to make some telepathic contact with Lars-Erik Hassel’s suffering.

It didn’t work.

It was there, but it was beyond words.

Agent Schonbauer drove with a practiced hand through chaotic traffic of abnormal dimensions. Larner sat next to him, talking to Hjelm and Holm in the backseat: about the late-summer heat in New York, about “community policing,” the city’s new and successful model for fighting crime, about the structure and strange priorities of the Swedish police system, about the autumn storm in Stockholm, and extremely superficially, about the FBI and the Kentucky Killer. Throughout
Hjelm watched Larner, whose body language said something different than what the official, dark FBI costume projected. His controlled, cheerful relaxation and smooth, exact motions seemed to beg forgiveness for his getup. Hjelm amused himself by comparing expected and actual appearances. First and foremost, he had not expected Larner to be black; embedded in that assumption, of course, was a whole package of prejudices. But he hadn’t expected him to be so alert, either, after all the setbacks with K: the futile search twenty years ago; the pursuit of the apparently innocent Commando Cool leader Wayne Jennings, which had ended in Jennings’s death; the resultant lawsuit and Larner’s demotion; and then the reboot, when everything started up again. But Larner seemed detached, as if he were watching the spectacle with an indulgent smile. He seemed to possess the divine gift of being able to separate his professional and personal lives; he radiated, in some way, a happy home life.

They entered the gigantic Holland Tunnel, passed under the Hudson River, and came out on Canal Street, then turned left into SoHo. They drove up Eighth Avenue and arrived at a small hotel by the name of Skipper’s Inn near Chelsea Park. Because a free parking spot was as rare as a Swiftian utopia, they were dropped off on the sidewalk after being informed that Larner would return in an hour and a half. They climbed the stairs to the peculiarly long, narrow building that was crammed like a turn-of-the-century relic between two considerably glitzier Manhattan complexes of pearly glass.

They were given adjoining rooms, each with a window facing out onto West Twenty-fifth Street, and thus took up a quarter of the sixth floor of this lodging house, which actually succeeded in feigning resemblance to an English inn—or rather, several inns stacked on top of one another. Their rooms were small and cozy, with a rustic touch, if you could ignore the roar outside the nonfunctional, quadruple-paned windows.
Although the air conditioning was spurting air at full force and was competing with the racket from the street, it wasn’t able to cool the room below body temperature.

Hjelm lay down on the bed, which rocked precariously. He had never been to the United States before, but there were two things he associated with the country: air conditioning and ice. Where was the ice? He got up and went over to the mini-bar. The top half of the small refrigerator was a freezer, and sure enough, it was filled with ice cubes. He took a few, returned to the bed, and let the ice cubes balance like horns on his forehead until they fell to his ears.

How he had longed for the sun in the Stockholm rain! Now he longed for the Stockholm rain.
The grass is always greener
, he thought, clichéd; his brain felt mushy.

In American films, New York was either sparkling with hysterical but happy Christmas snow, or it was boiling like a cauldron in the midsummer sun. Now he understood why. In mid-September, the happy Christmas snow was months away.

He made his way to the shabby but
amicably
shabby bathroom. There was a shower in a grungy little bathtub, and he made use of it, without preparing toiletries or a change of clothes—he just went straight in, satisfied that he’d remembered to take off what he was wearing. When he was finished, he didn’t dry off but went over to the sink and drank from it. After five gulps it struck him that perhaps he shouldn’t drink the water, and he spat and sputtered. The last thing he needed was to get a juicy case of travelers’ diarrhea.

He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. In keeping with the style of the room, it was properly cracked. His reflection somewhat split, he met his own gaze a bit cubistically. The blemish on his cheek was the same as ever, but he gave thanks to various creators that it had at least stopped growing. For a while he had worried that it would end up covering his whole face.

Why did Kerstin’s presence always make him think of that blemish?

He wandered into the bedroom, naked, and by the time he covered the twelve feet, he was dry; when he lay down on the bed, the sweat began to return. He lay there and pondered his male organ. He considered masturbating—that was always a way to make oneself feel at home—but the circumstances weren’t right. Instead, he practiced an appropriate breathing method, as strength-preserving as possible, and quickly fell asleep.

In his dream, just at the right moment, Kerstin popped in. He was in a different hotel room. He was sleeping in his sleep and dreaming in his dream. Or rather, in his dream, he found himself in a state between dream and wakefulness. Then she came in. From nowhere, her small, dark figure sailed through the room. In his dream they had talked about sex earlier that evening, a bit tipsily, but openly, maturely, modernly. It didn’t have to result in anything.

He had happened—if you could call it
happened
—to mention his favorite fantasy, and now she was lying beside him and masturbating, just a few feet away. His subconscious had pedantically stored the memory of each of her movements, and for a year it had drawn them forth at night, every little singularity in the way she touched herself, every caress; and a whole collection of his desires and longings were interspersed with every movement. Then there was a knock, and she drew her hand down through the triangle of hair like a harrow; there was a knock, and she slowly, slowly spread her legs; there was a knock, and she caught hold of …

There was a knock.

He shot straight up in bed and looked down at his erection.

“Paul?” a feminine whisper came through the door. “Are you awake?”

“Yes! I’m naked!” He was almost awake. “Awake!” he called a
bit louder, hoping that the door was resistant to Freudian slips. “Is it time already?”

“Not really,” said Kerstin. “Will you let me in?”

“Hold on,” He was finally awake. His erection was still awfully stiff. He came up with a white lie: “I’m in the shower, wait a minute!”

Why couldn’t he work with this woman without making her into a sex object? Was he not a grown man? He thought he had a relatively healthy view of equality and women’s rights and all, but lust was a tyrant that would always live on. If anything, he thought, he was making her into a sex
subject
, but where the fuck was the limit?

Ridiculously, his erection didn’t give up. He laughed at himself. What a fool! And the fool had to make a choice: put her off, and risk burning up the last vestiges of their built-up trust, or else be honest—and risk burning up the last vestiges of their built-up trust.

He teetered on the brink for a few seconds, then: “I’ve got an erection.”

“What the hell are you saying? Let me in.”

He grabbed a towel from in the bathroom and wrapped it around himself. It looked so pathetic that it no longer
was
pathetic by the time he reached the door and turned the key. She stepped in, clad in an elegant, tight little black dress.

“What did you say?” she asked the more or less presentable newly showered person.

“I was in the shower,” he said, gesturing awkwardly. “I didn’t think it was time yet.”

“But you’re dry,” she said skeptically.

“The heat. Everything dries right away.”

“It
isn’t
time yet,” she said in a more professional tone, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I just thought we could talk through our strategy.”

“Strategy?” He bent over the suitcase on the other side of the bed. His towel wasn’t on tightly, so he had to hold it with one hand and undo the straps of the suitcase with the other. It wasn’t all that easy.

“That looks hard,” she said maternally, turning away. “Let go of the towel. I promise not to look.”

Relieved, he let go of the towel, took out fresh clothes, and put them on. “Why do we need a strategy?”

“It’s the FBI we’re going to meet with. They’re going to see us as the country cousins on a visit to the big city. They’ll consider it to be their primary task to make sure we don’t get run over or robbed and murdered or become junkies. We have to know exactly what we want to do here and stand firm. They’re the ones who are going to supply us with tasks, not the other way around; the killer is on our turf. So what is it we’re actually doing here?”

He took out a narrow purple tie and started to tie it. “We’re going to fish for clues and see if they’ve missed anything.”

“But we can’t put it that way … Are you going to wear that?”

He looked down himself. “What?”