Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

What he should do was speak to Larsson without delay. Then again, perhaps not just yet. He needed to think. He had a head start, and wanted to make the most of it. Veronica Molin didn’t know what he had seen through her curtains. Would he be able to use the head start he had to his advantage?

He left the bridge and walked back to the hotel. There was only one thing to do. Talk to her. Two men were playing cards in the lobby. They nodded to him but concentrated on their game. Lindman stopped at her door and knocked. Once again he had the urge to kick it in, but he knocked instead. She opened immediately. He could see over her shoulder that the computer screen was blank.

“I was about to go to bed,” she said.

“Not just yet. We need to talk.”

She let him in.

“I want to sleep alone tonight. Just so that you know.”

“That’s not why I’ve come. Although I do wonder about that, of course. Why you wanted me to sleep here. Without my being allowed to touch you.”

“It was you who wanted to. I do admit that I can feel lonely at times.”

She sat down on the bed, and just like last night pulled up her legs beneath her. He was attracted to her, and his wounded anger only made the feeling stronger.

He sat on the creaking chair.

“What do you want? Has something happened? The man on the mountain? Have you caught him?”

“I don’t know. But that’s not why I’ve come. I’ve come about a lie.”

“Whose?”

“Yours.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I have no patience with people who don’t come right to the point.”

“Then I’ll come right to the point. A few minutes ago you were working at your computer. Your screen was filled with a swastika.”

It was a few seconds before the penny dropped. Then she glanced at the window and the curtains.

“Precisely,” he said. “I looked in. You’d be right to complain about that. I looked in when I shouldn’t have. But it wasn’t that I hoped to see you naked. It was just an impulse. And I saw the swastika.”

He could see that she was perfectly calm.

“That’s absolutely right. There was a swastika on my screen not long ago. Black against a red background. But what’s the lie?”

“You take after your father. You claimed the opposite. You said you were trying to protect his past, but in fact it was yourself you were trying to protect.”

“What from?”

“The fact that you are a Nazi.”

“Is that what you think?”

She stood up, lit a cigarette, and remained standing. “You are not only stupid,” she said, “you’re full of yourself. I thought you were better than the run-of-the-mill policeman, but you’re not. You’re just an insignificant little shit.”

“You won’t get anywhere by insulting me. You could spit in my face and I wouldn’t lose my temper.”

She sat down on the bed again.

“I suppose in a way it’s just as well you were snooping,” she said. “At least we can get this business out of the way very quickly.”

“I’m listening.”

She stubbed out her cigarette.

“What do you know about computers? About the Internet?”

“Not a lot. I know there’s a lot of Internet traffic that ought to be stopped. Child pornography, for instance. You said you could keep in touch with the whole world, no matter where you were. ‘I have my entire life on this,’ you said.”

She sat down at her computer and beckoned him to pull his chair closer.

“I’ll take you on a journey,” she said. “Through cyberspace. I suppose that’s a term you must have heard?”

She pressed a button on her keyboard. A faint whirring came from inside the computer. The screen came to life. She pressed various keys. Images and patterns flickered across the screen until it turned red all over. The black swastika appeared gradually.

“This network embracing the whole globe has its underworld, just as the real world does. You can find anything at all there.”

She tapped away at the keys. The swastika disappeared. Lindman found himself staring at half-naked Asian girls. She tapped more keys; the girls were replaced by pictures of St. Peter’s in Rome.

“You can find everything in here,” she said. “It’s a marvelous tool. You can retrieve information no matter where you are. Just now, at this moment, Sveg is the center of the world. But there’s also an underworld. Endless amounts of information about where you can buy guns, drugs, pornographic pictures of little children. Everything.”

She tapped away again. The swastika returned.

“This too. Lots of Nazi organizations, including several Swedish ones, publicize their opinions on my computer screen. I was sitting here trying to understand. I was looking for the people who are members of Nazi organizations today. How many of them there are, what their organizations are called, how they think.”

She tapped the keys again. A picture of Hitler. More tapping, and suddenly she appeared on the screen herself. “Veronica Molin. Broker.”

She turned it off. The screen went black.

“Now I’d like you to leave,” she said. “You chose to jump to a conclusion on the basis of a picture you saw on my screen when you were snooping around and looking in at my window. Perhaps you still think I’m stupid enough to sit here worshiping a swastika. It’s up to you to decide if you’re an idiot or not, but please go anyway. We have nothing more to say to each other.”

Lindman didn’t know what to do. She was upset, convincingly so.

“If the situation had been reversed,” he said, “how would you have reacted?”

“I’d have asked. Not immediately accused you of lying.”

She stood up and flung open the door.

“I can’t stop you from going to my father’s funeral,” she said. “But I shall feel no compulsion to speak to you there, or to shake your hand.”

She ushered Lindman out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. He went back to the lobby. The card players had left. He went up to his room, wondering why he had reacted the way he did. He was rescued by a telephone call. It was Larsson.

“I hope you weren’t asleep.”

“On the contrary.”

“Wide awake?”

“Very much so.”

He thought he might as well tell Larsson what had happened.

“It’s a dangerous habit, peeping into little girls’ bedrooms. You never know what you might see,” he said, laughing.

“I acted like an idiot.”

“We all do sometimes. Not all at the same time, with any luck.”

“Did you know that you can look up all the Nazi organizations in the world on the Internet?”

“Probably not all of them. What was the word she used? ‘Underworld’? No doubt there are lots of different rooms down there. I suspect the really dangerous organizations don’t advertise their names and addresses on the Internet.”

“You mean it’s only possible to scrape the surface?”

“Something like that.”

Lindman sneezed. And again.

“I hope that’s not something you’ve caught from me.”

“How’s your throat?”

“I have a slight temperature; it’s swollen on the left side. People who get to see as much misery as we do often succumb to hypochondria.”

“I have enough to deal with in the real world.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I put my foot in my mouth again.”

“What did you want?”

“Somebody to talk to, I suppose.”

“Are you still in Johansson’s office?”

“Yes, and I’ve got coffee.”

“I’ll be there.”

As he passed the front of the hotel he glanced at Veronica Molin’s window. He could just see that the light was still on, but the gap in the curtains was gone.