The Dogs Of Riga Part 20

"I'm most grateful that you came," Lippman said quietly. Wallander had to lean forward in order to hear what he was saying.

"You didn't give me any choice," he said. "First a letter, then a telephone call. Maybe you should start by telling me who you are."

Lippman shook his head. "Who I am is of no significance. You are the important one, Mr Wallander."

"No," Wallander said, feeling himself getting annoyed again. "You must understand that I've no intention of listening to what you've got to say if you're not even prepared to confide in me who you are."

The waitress arrived with the tea, and they waited until they were alone again.

"My role is merely that of organiser and messenger," Lippman said. "Who wants to know the name of the messenger? It doesn't matter. We are meeting here tonight, and then I shall disappear. We will probably never meet again. The important thing, therefore, is not confiding in you, but practical decisions. Security is always a practical matter. In my view the business of trust is also a practical matter."

"In that case we might just as well conclude the conversation straight away" Wallander said.

"I've got a message for you from Baiba Liepa," Lippman said hastily. "Don't you even want to hear that?"

Wallander relaxed. He observed the man sitting opposite him, strangely hunched up, as if his health were so fragile he might collapse any moment.

"I don't want to hear anything until I know who you are," he said eventually. "It's as simple as that."

Lippman took off his gla.s.ses and carefully poured some milk into his tea.

"I'm merely thinking of your own best interests, Mr Wallander," Lippman said. "In this day and age it's often best to know as little as possible."

"I've been to Latvia," Wallander said. "I've been there, and I think I know what it is to be constantly under observation, forever being checked. But we're in Sweden now, not Riga."

Lippman nodded pensively. "You may be right," he said, "Perhaps I am an old man who can no longer discern how reality is changing."

"A nursery," Wallander said, in an attempt to help him out. "I don't suppose they have always been like they are now?"

"I came to Sweden in the autumn of 1941," Lippman said, stirring his tea. "I was a young man then, and I had the naive ambition of becoming an artist, a great artist. It was freezing cold as dawn broke and we caught sight of the Gotland coast. That was the moment we knew we'd made it, despite the fact that the boat had sprung a leak and several of my companions on board were seriously ill.

We were undernourished, we had tuberculosis. Nevertheless, I have a clear memory of that freezing cold dawn. It was the beginning of March, and I made up my mind I was going to paint a picture of the Swedish coast that would symbolise freedom. That's what it might look like, the gates of paradise. Cold and frozen, a few black cliffs barely visible through the mist. But I never did paint that picture. I became a gardener instead. Now I make a living by suggesting appropriate decorative plants for various Swedish firms. I've noticed how people, and especially people working for the new information technology companies, have an insatiable need to hide their machines among green plants. I shall never paint that picture of paradise. I'll just have to make do with the fact that I've seen it. I know paradise has many gates, just as h.e.l.l does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost."

"And that is something Major Liepa could do?" Lippman did not react to Wallander's mention of the major.

"Major Liepa knew what the gates looked like," he said, "but that's not why he had to die. He died because he had seen who was going in and out through those gates. People who are afraid of the light, because the light makes them visible to people like Major Liepa."

Wallander had the impression that Lippman was a deeply religious man. He expressed himself like a priest standing before a congregation.

"I have lived the whole of my life in exile," Lippman continued. "For the first ten years, until the middle of the 1950s, I believed I would one day be able to return to my home country. Then came the interminable 1960s and 70s, when I'd completely given up hope. Only very ancient Latvians living in exile, only the really old and the really young and the really mad Latvians believed the world would change so that we might one day be able to return to our homeland. They believed in a dramatic turning point, while I was expecting a long drawn-out conclusion to the tragedy that even then seemed to be complete. But very suddenly things began to happen. We received mysterious reports from our homeland, optimistic reports. We saw the gigantic Soviet Union beginning to tremble, as if some latent fever had at last begun to take hold. Could it really be that what we had never dared to believe might actually happen? We still don't know the answer to that question. We realise that we might yet again be tricked out of our freedom. The Soviet Union is weakened, but that could be a temporary condition. We do not have much time at our disposal. Major Liepa knew that, and that is what drove him on."

"We?" Wallander said. "Who are we?"

"All Latvians in Sweden belong to an organisation," Lippman answered. "We have joined various organisations as a subst.i.tute for our lost homeland. We have tried to help people retain their culture, we have constructed various lifelines, we have established foundations. We have listened to cries for help and we have attempted to respond to them. We have fought constantiy to avoid being forgotten. Our exile organisations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost."

The gla.s.s door opened and a man entered. Lippman reacted immediately. Wallander recognised the man - his name was Elmberg and he was the manager of one of the local petrol stations.

"There's no cause for alarm," he said. "That man hasn't hurt a fly since the day he was born. I doubt if he's ever given a thought to the existence of Latvia. He's the manager of a petrol station."

"Baiba Liepa has sent a cry for help," Lippman said. "She is asking that you to come. She needs your a.s.sistance."

He took an envelope from his inside pocket. "From Baiba Liepa," he said. "For you."

Wallander took the envelope. It was not sealed, and he carefully extracted the thin writing paper. Her message was brief, and written in pencil, as if in a hurry.

There is a testimony and a guardian, she had written, she had written, but I'm afraid I shall be unable to discover the right place on my own. Trust the messenger as you once trusted my husband, Baiba. but I'm afraid I shall be unable to discover the right place on my own. Trust the messenger as you once trusted my husband, Baiba.

"We can supply everything you need in order to get to Riga," Lippman said when Wallander put the letter down. "You can hardly make me invisible!" "Invisible?"

"If I go to Riga I must become somebody new. How will you manage that? How can you guarantee my safety?"

"You will have to trust us, Mr Wallander. But we don't have much time."

Wallander could see that Lippman was anxious. He tried to convince himself that none of what was happening all around him was real. But he knew that this was what the world was like. Baiba Liepa had made one of the thousands of cries for help that are constantly sent across continents. This one was meant for him, and he was obliged to answer.

"I've requested leave from Thursday onwards," he said. "Officially I'm going skiing in the Alps. I can be away for just over a week."

Lippman slid his cup to one side. His weak, melancholy expression had been replaced by fierce determination.

"That's an excellent idea," he said. "Naturally, a Swedish police officer goes to the Alps every winter to try his luck on the piste. What route are you travelling?"

"Via Sa.s.snitz, then by car through the old East Germany."

"What's the name of your hotel?"

"I've no idea. I've never been to the Alps before."

"But you can ski?"

"Yes."

Lippman was deep in thought. Wallander beckoned the waitress and ordered a cup of coffee. Lippman shook his head absent-mindedly when Wallander asked him if he wanted any more tea. Eventually he removed his gla.s.ses and rubbed them carefully against the sleeve of his jacket.

"Going to the Alps is an excellent idea," he repeated. "But I need a bit of time to make the necessary arrangements. Tomorrow evening somebody will phone you and inform you which of the morning ferries you should take from Trelleborg. Whatever else you do, don't forget to put your skis on the roof rack. Pack everything as if you really were going to the Alps."

"How do you think I'm going to be able to enter Latvia?"

"You'll find out all you need to know on the ferry. Somebody will make contact with you. You will have to trust us."

"I can't guarantee that I'll accept your plan."

"There's no such thing as a guarantee in this world of ours, Mr Wallander. All I can do is promise that we shall do our best to excel ourselves. Perhaps we ought to pay and go now?"

They took leave of each other outside the pizzeria. The wind had come up and was squalling. Joseph Lippman bade him a hasty farewell before disappearing in the direction of the railway station. Wallander walked home through the deserted town, thinking over what Baiba Liepa had written.

The dogs are on her trail, he thought. She's scared and worried. The colonels have also caught on to the fact that the major must have left a testimony somewhere. It dawned on him that there was no time to lose. There was no longer any place for fear or second thoughts. He had to respond to her cry for help.

The next day he prepared for the journey.

Shordy after 6 p.m. a woman rang to say he'd been booked on to the ferry leaving Trelleborg at 5.30 a.m. the next morning. To Wallander's astonishment, she announced herself as a representative for "Lippman's Travel Agency".

He went to bed at midnight. His last thought before going to sleep was how crazy the whole scheme was. He was on the point of getting involved voluntarily in something that was doomed to fail. At the same time, Baiba's cry for help was real, and he felt bound to answer it.

Early the next morning he drove onto the ferry in Trelleborg harbour. One of the pa.s.sport officials waved to him and asked where he was going.

"To the Alps," Wallander told him.

"Sounds great."

"Does you good to get away occasionally." "That's what we all need to do." "I couldn't have kept going a single day longer." "Well, you can forget all about being a police officer for a few days."

"I will," Wallander said, but knew that was definitely not true. He was about to embark on his toughest a.s.signment. An a.s.signment that didn't even exist.

The dawn skies were grey. He went up on deck as the ferry pulled away. He shivered as he watched the open sea slowly grow as the ship moved further from land and the Swedish coast disappeared from view.

He was in the cafeteria having a bite to eat when a man in his 50s, with a ruddy face and shifty eyes, approached him and introduced himself as Preuss. Preuss had written instructions from Joseph Lippman, and a brand new ident.i.ty that Wallander was to use from now on.

"Let's take a walk up on deck," Preuss suggested.

There was thick fog over the Baltic the day Wallander went back to Riga.

CHAPTER 15.

The border was invisible.

It was there nevertheless, inside him, like a coil of barbed wire, just under his breast-bone. Kurt Wallander was scared. He would look back on the final steps he took on Lithuanian soil to the Latvian border as a crippling trek towards a country from where he would find himself shouting Dante's words: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here! n.o.body returns from here - at least, no Swedish police officer will get out alive.

The night sky was filled with stars. Preuss had been with him from the moment he had made contact on board the Trelleborg ferry, and he didn't seem unmoved by what was in store. Through the darkness Wallander could hear that his breathing was fast and irregular.

"We must wait," Preuss whispered in his barely comprehensible German. "Warten, warten" "Warten, warten"

At first, Wallander had been furious at being supplied with a guide who didn't speak a word of English. He wondered what Joseph Lippman had been thinking of, a.s.suming that a Swedish police officer, barely able to string together a few words of English, would be a German speaker. Wallander had come very close to calling the whole thing, which now appeared to be the triumph of wild fantasy over his own common sense, off. It seemed to him that the Latvians had been living in exile for too long and had lost all touch with reality. Twisted by grief, over-optimistic or just plain mad. How could this man Preuss, this skinny little man with the scarred face, inspire Wallander with sufficient courage, and not least provide sufficient security, to enable him to return to Latvia as an invisible, nonexistent person? What did he actually know about Preuss, who had simply appeared in the ferry cafeteria? That he might be a Latvian citizen living in exile, that he might be earning his living as a coin dealer in the German city of Kiel - but what else? Absolutely nothing.

Nevertheless, something had made him keep going, and Preuss had sat beside him in the pa.s.senger seat, dozing all the time, while Wallander sped on following the directions Preuss gave him by pointing at a road atlas. They travelled eastwards through the former East Germany and by 5 p.m. were five kilometres short of the Polish border, where Wallander backed his car into a rickety barn next to a decaying farmhouse. The man who met them was yet another exiled Latvian, but he spoke good English. He promised that the car would be kept completely safe until Wallander returned. They waited until nightfall, then stumbled through a dense spruce forest until they reached the border, and crossed the first invisible line on the route to Riga. In a little town whose name Wallander quickly forgot, they were met by Janick, a man with a heavy cold, who picked them up in an old, rusty lorry. A b.u.mpy, jerky ride over the Polish steppe ensued. Wallander caught the driver's cold, and longed for a decent meal and a bath, but all he was offered were cold pork chops and camp beds in freezing houses out in the Polish hinterland. Progress was slow. Generally they travelled at night or just before dawn. The rest of the time was pa.s.sed in sleep or in uncomfortable silence. He tried to understand why Preuss was being so cautious. What had they to fear, as long as they were in Poland? He was given no explanation. Preuss understood little of what Wallander was saying, and Janick hummed an English pop song from the war years, when he wasn't sniffing and snivelling and spreading germs in Wallander's direction. When they finally got to the Lithuanian border Wallander had started to hate "We'll meet again". He could just as easily have been somewhere in the heart of Russia as in Poland. Or Czechoslovakia, or Bulgaria. He had completely lost all sense of where Sweden was in relation to where they were. The lunacy of the whole undertaking became more obvious with every kilometre that the lorry took him deeper into the unknown. They travelled through Lithuania on a series of buses, none of which had any springs, and now, four whole days after Preuss had first contacted him on the ferry, they were close to the Latvian border, in the middle of a forest smelling strongly of resin.

" Warten? Preuss kept repeating, and Wallander sat down obediently on a tree stump and waited. He was cold, and felt sick. Preuss kept repeating, and Wallander sat down obediently on a tree stump and waited. He was cold, and felt sick.

I'll have pneumonia by the time I get to Riga, he thought desperately. Of all the stupid things I've done in my life, this is the stupidest, and it deserves no respect, nothing more than a loud guffaw of scorn. Here, on a tree stump in a Lithuanian forest, sits a Swedish police officer in early middle age, one who has completely lost his sense of judgement and gone out of his mind.

But there was no going back. Clearly he would never be able to retrace his steps without help. He was totally dependent on the confounded Preuss, who the idiot Lippman had allocated to him as a guide, and there was no alternative but to keep going, further and further away from the dictates of reason, until they came to Riga.

On the ferry, just as the Swedish coastline disappeared from view, Preuss had introduced himself as Wallander was having coffee in the cafeteria. They had gone out on deck in the biting wind. Preuss had with him a letter from Lippman, and to his astonishment Wallander found himself a.s.suming yet another new ident.i.ty. This time he wasn't to be "Mr Eckers", but Herr Hegel, Herr Gottfried Hegel, a German sales representative for a sheet music and fine art book publisher. He was amazed when, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Preuss handed over a German pa.s.sport with Wallander's photograph duly glued in place and stamped. He recognised it as a photograph Linda had taken of him several years earlier - how Lippman had got hold of it was a mystery. He was now Herr Hegel, and eventually realised from Preuss's stubborn talk and gesticulating that he should hand over his Swedish pa.s.sport for the time being. Wallander gave him the doc.u.ment, knowing he was mad to do so.

It was now four days since he had been confronted by his new ident.i.ty. Preuss had scrambled onto an uprooted tree, and Wallander could just see his face through the darkness. The man seemed to be peering into the east. It was a few minutes past midnight. Suddenly Preuss raised his hand and pointed eagerly to the east. They had hung a paraffin lamp on a branch so that Wallander wouldn't lose contact with Preuss. He stood up and squinted in the direction Preuss was pointing. He made out a faint, blinking light as if a cyclist with a faulty dynamo was coming towards them.

"Gehen!" he whispered. he whispered. "Schnell, nun. Gehen!" "Schnell, nun. Gehen!"

Twigs and branches poked and scratched at Wallander's face. I'm crossing the final border, he thought, but I have barbed wire in my stomach.

They came to a boundary line cut through the forest like a street. Preuss held Wallander back briefly while he listened attentively, then he dragged him across the empty s.p.a.ce and into the cover of the dense forest on the other side. After about 10 minutes they came upon a muddy cart track and found a car waiting. Wallander could see the glow from a cigarette inside. Somebody got out and came towards him with a hooded torch. All of a sudden, he realised Inese was standing before him.

It would be a long time before he forgot the surge of joy and relief at seeing her, at encountering something familiar after all the unknown. She smiled at him in the faint light from the torch, but he couldn't think of anything to say. Preuss stretched out his skinny hand in farewell, then was swallowed up by the forest before Wallander even had time to say goodbye.

"It's a long way to Riga," Inese said. "We must get going."

Occasionally they left the road so that Inese could have a rest, and they also had a puncture in one of the tyres, which Wallander had managed to change with enormous effort. He had suggested he might do some of the driving, but she had merely shaken her head, without giving any explanation.

He realised straight away that something had happened. There was something hardened and determined about Inese that couldn't simply be put down to exhaustion. He sat beside her in silence, unsure whether she'd have the strength to answer questions. He had been told that Baiba Liepa was expecting him, and that Upitis was still in prison, that his confession had been reported in the newspapers.

"My name's Gottfried Hegel this time," he said when they'd been under way for two hours and had stopped to fill up with petrol from a spare can he'd got from the back seat.

"I know," Inese answered. "It's not a very attractive name."

"Tell me why I'm here, Inese. How am I to help you?"

She didn't answer. Instead, she asked him if he was hungry and pa.s.sed him a bottle of beer and two meat sandwiches in a paper bag. Then they continued their journey. At one point he dozed off, but shook himself awake, worried that she might fall asleep at the wheel.

They reached the outskirts of Riga shortly before dawn. It was 21 March, his sister's birthday. In an attempt to embellish his new ident.i.ty, he decided that Gottfried Hegel had a large number of brothers and sisters, and that his youngest sister was called Kristina. He could see Mrs Hegel in his mind's eye, a rather masculine woman with the beginnings of a moustache, and their house in Schwabingen built of red brick with a well-kept but characterless back garden. The story Lippman had supplied as background to the pa.s.sport had been sketchy in the extreme. Wallander reckoned it would take an experienced interrogator no more than a minute to demolish Gottfried Hegel, and expose the pa.s.sport as fake.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"We're nearly there," she replied.

"How can I be at all useful if n.o.body tells me anything?" he asked. "What are you keeping from me? What's happened?"

"I'm tired," she said, "but we're pleased you've come back. Baiba is happy. She'll burst into tears when she sees you."

"Why won't you answer my questions? Something's happened, I can see you're scared to death. What is it?"

"Everything has become much more difficult these last two weeks, but it's better if Baiba tells you herself. Anyway, there's a lot I don't know either."

They were driving through the endless suburbs. The silhouettes of factories were vaguely visible against the yellow, street-lamp sky. The deserted streets were shrouded in fog, and it occurred to Wallander that this was how he'd imagined the countries of Eastern Europe, countries that called themselves socialist and declared themselves to be paradise on earth.

Inese stopped outside an oblong warehouse, switched off the engine, and pointed to a low, iron door at one gable end.

"Go there," she said. "Knock, and they'll let you in. I must go."

"Will I see you again?"

"I don't know. That's up to Baiba."

"Aren't you forgetting you're my girlfriend?"