Helene Tursten - Detective Inspector Huss

A LITTLE later they were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking tea and eating open-faced egg sandwiches with Kalle’s caviar. Bit by bit the story came out. Jenny had told Markus that she didn’t want to go to the demonstrations on the anniversary of Karl XII’s death. She didn’t want to shout slogans that she didn’t agree with. But she did want to stay in the band. Markus got furious and said, “If you don’t believe in them, then you can’t stay with the band. You’ve shown where you stand!”

Then he turned on his heel and left. Jenny was devastated, because she was in love with him, or so she thought anyway. He was the first boy who had kissed her so her knees got weak. When Katarina mentioned this, Jenny flared up again but soon calmed down. That was exactly how it had felt.

It had been Katarina’s idea to rent Schindler’s List that night. Grandma was coming over, and surely she would enjoy a movie that took place during her own youth. The movie was about a man who pretended to cooperate with the Nazis while he succeeded in saving hundreds of Jews from the extermination camps.

Katarina told her mother that after the movie Grandma had described in detail her own experiences as a seventeen-year-old at the end of the war. About the white Red Cross buses that emptied their cargoes of walking skeletons. At her school they had opened up the baths. Nurses had stripped the ragged clothes caked with filth off the human wrecks. They were treated with delousing powder and scrubbed with hot water and scrub brushes. A poor old Jewish man was so scared when they were about to delouse him that he had a heart attack and died! He thought it was poison. Like the poison the Nazis used when they wanted to kill lots of people at once. Although that was probably gas, Grandma said. Her job had been to hand out clean clothes and help those who couldn’t even dress themselves. Strangely enough, Grandma didn’t say a word about Jenny’s clean-shaven head. It was as if she didn’t even see it.

By then Jenny thought that her sister had been allowed to talk long enough. After all, this was mostly about her! Eagerly she broke into the conversation. “When Grandma finished telling her story, I asked her if she really had seen all those people who had been in concentration camps. She had. Then I asked if it was true that there were really extermination camps. And then she said ‘Yes.’ I asked why they let it happen! Why didn’t the Swedes protest that millions of people were being killed in these camps? But she didn’t know the answer. Then she said that in Sweden we didn’t know about it during the war. It wasn’t until the war was over and Hitler was dead that the camps were opened and people found out about it. I think that sounds incredible! I mean … it’s not so strange that someone might not believe that the camps existed. . since nobody reacted during the war. They just let it happen!”

She stopped and Irene sensed a slightly apologetic tone in those final remarks. Jenny sat running her fingernail along the edge of the table. That was a sign that she was holding back something that was difficult to say. Finally she took a deep breath and said, “Could you tell Tommy that I’m not a racist? We don’t have to be enemies. I don’t want that! Tell him. I’m not a racist, really. The lyrics are racist. I can hear that now. Totally. I gave my CDs back to Markus. He can give them to Marie!”

“Is she the one who’s a ‘God damned skag’?”

“Exactly! She is a God damned skag!”

It wasn’t necessary to ask for an explanation of the word. Her tone of voice explained everything.

Cautiously Irene asked, “What happened to Markus?”

Jenny turned all crinkly around the eyes, but before Katarina could start to speak for her again, she said with a teary tremble in her voice, “Markus and Marie started going steady yesterday. She’s in the eighth grade.”

“Is she a skinhead too?”

“Naw, she has neon pink hair. Sometimes she makes lavender loops in it. And she got pierced too. She has a ring in her eyebrow, one in her upper lip, and one in her nose. Disgusting!”

Both daughters were agreed that it was “totally heinous,” and Irene was grateful for that.

WHEN KRISTER came home at one A.M. the girls were asleep, but Irene was still up. After telling him about Jenny’s troubles and about the impending end to her skinhead period, she tried to seduce her husband. But he was too tired and not at all in the mood. The Christmas rush at the city’s restaurants had begun. She lay awake for a long time, her whirling thoughts of skinheads, millionaires, bombs, murderers, biker gangs, sexual relations between people who shouldn’t be having any, and sexual relations between people who should.

From sheer exhaustion she fell asleep, until the sobbing woke her. But she must have been dreaming. Nobody in the house was crying.

THERE WASN’T a free parking place in the whole city. Finally Irene drove down to police headquarters and put her car in the lot. Both Jenny and Katarina were bursting with anticipation. They had a hard time maintaining their teenage dignity when the little kid inside them demanded to come out. Jenny had pulled a bright red chimney-sweep cap over her ears. Not just to hide her scalp, but also because it was very cold. Only a few degrees below freezing, but it was windy. That’s when Göteborg feels like the Antarctic. Irene and the twins ran toward the downtown shopping district to keep their circulation going.

Garlands with lights and stars were stretched across the pedestrian-only streets. The tall trees in Brunnparken and along Östra Hamngatan glittered with hundreds of tiny lights woven into their leafless branches. But few people looked up at the crowns of the trees. Most of them burrowed their chins down into their collars and hunched their shoulders against the wind. They wanted to get into the lovely warmth, and the shopkeepers were rubbing their hands. That was exactly what they wanted too.

The girls popped in and out of clothing stores. Irene looked at a few jackets, but a glance at the price tags made her decide to wait until spring. She would only have to wear a winter jacket for a few more months. Spring and fall jackets could wait. But she missed her poplin one.

“Look, Mamma! Too cool, huh?”

Katarina’s trumpeting woke Irene out of her reverie when she walked out of the dressing room like a runway model, dressed in a bright orange top that came down to her navel and a pair of moss-green bell-bottoms. First she just stared at her daughter. Finally she couldn’t hold it back any longer and burst out laughing.

“What are you cackling at?” Katarina said. “This is totally modern! Try and keep up, okay?”

Jenny agreed and said patronizingly to her old fossil of a mother, “This is the latest thing, after all.”

Irene tried hard to contain herself. “I’m sorry, but it’s just that I recognized myself. I looked just like that when I was your age.”

Both her daughters gave her a skeptical look and exchanged a glance heavenward. The hardest thing to believe was that Mamma was ever their age.

Just like all the other shoppers looking at the decorations and searching for gifts, they wound up in NK. Irene was tired and needed a cup of coffee, but the girls voted to go look around the department store first. With a sigh, after a mild protest, Irene had to give in. Whenever the girls joined forces, she was in the minority. All the lights and glitter began to drain the energy out of her. And the elves-! Wherever you looked you saw an elf. Tiny elves, giant elves, artificial elves, and live elves. One of them almost scared her to death when it bent forward and touched her arm and asked if she didn’t want to buy a new shaver for the “little husband.”