Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

Lindman experienced the rest of what the man had to say as a long, drawn-out scream.

“He’d strangled him with his own belt! Then shoved a shattered record into his mouth. The label was covered in blood, but I could see that it was a tango. I’ve spent the rest of my life looking for the man who did that to my father. It wasn’t until I happened to bump into Höllner that I discovered who the murderer really was. Learned that my father’s murderer was a Swede, somebody who hadn’t even been forced into serving Hitler, never mind giving vent to an utterly pointless and incomprehensible hatred of Jews. He killed the man who had tried to help him overcome his shyness and teach him to dance. I don’t know what Waldemar Lehmann did to Mattson-Herzén, I have no idea what he beat into him, what he threatened him with. What made him swallow the ultimate Nazi lunacy. It doesn’t matter. He came to our house that day not to learn how to dance, but to kill my father. That murder was so brutal, so horrific, that it is beyond description. My father lay dead with his own belt around his neck. He wasn’t the only one to die. His wife, my mother, and me and my brothers and sisters — all of us died. We all died with that belt around our necks. We kept our lives going, it’s true — my mother only for a few months, until she’d arranged for her children to go abroad. That was the last favor my uncle managed to extract from Goering. Once we were in Switzerland he committed suicide; now I’m the only one of us left. None of my brothers and sisters got beyond their thirties. One brother drank himself to death, a sister took her own life, and I ended up in South America. How I searched for that young man, for that young soldier who killed my father! I suppose that’s why I went to South America, where such a lot of Nazis had fled. I couldn’t understand how he had the right to go on living after my father had died. I found him in the end, an old man who’d hidden himself with a new name, away up here in the forest. I killed him. I gave him his final dancing lesson, and I was about to go home when somebody killed his neighbor. What makes me anxious is to what extent I am responsible for that.”

Lindman waited for him to go on, but nothing was said for a while. He thought about the name Hereira had mentioned, Höllner. Something critical must have happened when they met.

“Who was Höllner?”

“The messenger I’d been waiting for all my life. A man who happened to be in the same restaurant as me one night in Buenos Aires. At first, when I discovered that he was a German emigrant, I was afraid he was one of the many Nazis who hid themselves in Argentina. Then I discovered that he was like me. A man who hated Hitler.”

Hereira fell silent again. Lindman waited.

“When I think back, it all seems so simple,” he said eventually. “Höllner came from Berlin, like me. And Höllner’s father had been given massage treatment by my uncle from the middle of the 1930s. My uncle was indispensable to Goering, who was constantly in pain as a result of his morphine addiction and couldn’t tolerate any masseur but my uncle. That was one starting point. The other was Waldemar Lehmann. A man who’d tortured and murdered prisoners in various concentration camps. His brother had been almost as bad. He was hanged in the autumn of 1945, but Waldemar they did not catch. He disappeared in the chaos at the end of the war and couldn’t be traced. He was high on the list of war criminals headed by Bormann. They found Eichmann, but not Waldemar Lehmann. One of those looking for him was an English major called Stuckford. I don’t know why, but he was in Germany in 1945 and must have seen the horrors when they entered the concentration camps. He’d also been present when Josef Lehmann was hanged. Stuckford’s research revealed that a Swedish soldier had been one of Waldemar Lehmann’s henchmen towards the end of the war, and that, egged on by Lehmann, the Swede had murdered his dancing master.”

Hereira paused again. It was as if he needed to gather strength to tell his story to the end.

“Sometime long after the war Höllner and Stuckford met at a conference for people trying to trace war criminals. They talked about the missing Waldemar Lehmann. During the conversation Höllner heard about the murder of a dancing master in Berlin, and he also heard that the man responsible was a Swede called Mattson-Herzén. Another Nazi had passed the information to Stuckford while being interrogated, hoping for clemency in return. Höllner told me all this. He also said that Stuckford occasionally visited Buenos Aires.”

Lindman heard Hereira reach for the bottle and put it down again without drinking.

“The next time Stuckford was in Buenos Aires I met him at his hotel. I introduced myself and explained that I was the son of the dancing master. About a year after that meeting I got a letter from England. In it Stuckford wrote that the soldier who’d killed my father, Mattson-Herzén, had changed his name to Molin after the war and was still alive. I’ll never forget that letter. Now I knew who had murdered my father. A man who used to give us a friendly smile when he arrived for his lessons. Stuckford’s contacts were eventually able to trace Mattson-Herzén to these forests.”

He paused again. There is no more, Lindman thought. No more is needed. I’ve heard the story. Sitting in front of me is a man who has avenged the murder of his father. We were right in thinking that Molin’s murder had its origin in something that happened in a war that ended many years ago. It seemed to Lindman that Hereira had completed for him a puzzle that he’d been working on. There was an irony in the fact that Molin had also spent his old age solving puzzles, in the constant company of his fear.

“Have you understood what I’ve told you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any questions?”

“Not about that, but I would like to know why you moved the dog.”

Hereira didn’t understand the question. Lindman rephrased it. “You killed Molin’s dog. When Andersson was dead, you took his dog.”

“I wanted to tell you that you were wrong about what happened. You thought I had killed the other man as well.”

“Why should we know that we were wrong because of the dog?”

His reply was simple and convincing. “I was drunk when I made up my mind what to do. I still don’t understand why nobody saw me. I moved the dog to create confusion. Confusion in the way you were thinking. I still don’t know if I was successful.”

“We did start asking different questions.”

“Then I achieved my aim.”

“When you first came, did you live in a tent by the lake?”

“Yes.”

Lindman could hear that Hereira’s impatience had melted away. He was calm now. There were no more clinking noises from the bottle. Hereira stood up, the floor vibrated. He was behind Lindman’s chair now. The fear that had subsided now revived. Lindman remembered the fingers around his neck. This time he was tied up. If the man tried to strangle him, he wouldn’t be able to resist.

When Hereira next spoke his voice came from the left. The chair creaked.

“I thought it would die away,” the voice said. “All those terrible things that happened so many years ago. But the thoughts that were born in Hitler’s twisted mind are still alive. They have other names now, but they are the same thoughts, the same disgusting conviction that a whole people can be killed off if another people or race ordains it. The new technology, computers, the international networks, they all help these groups to cooperate. Everything’s in computers these days.” Lindman remembered that he’d heard more or less the same phrase from Veronica Molin. Everything’s in computers these days.