The Dogs of Riga - Wallander 02 Page 16

  He had no experience of being shadowed, and only very rarely had he done any shadowing of a suspect himself. He ransacked his memory to try to recall any words of wisdom from Rydberg about the difficulties of tailing people, but was forced to conclude he had not expressed any views on the art of shadowing. Wallander also realised that he could not plan any surprise manoeuvres since he wasn't familiar with the streets of Riga. He would have to seize any opportunity that arose, and he was not confident of succeeding, but he felt bound to try. Baiba Liepa wouldn't have gone to such lengths to ensure that they met in secret unless she had good reason. Wallander couldn't imagine someone married to the major would be prone to overly dramatic gestures.

  It was already dark when he left the hotel, and it had started to get windy. He left his key at reception without saying where he was going or when he would be back. St Gertrude's Church, where the concert was to take place, was not far from the Latvia Hotel. He had a vague hope of being able to lose himself among all the people hurrying home from work.

  Out in the street, he buttoned up his jacket and glanced quickly round, but couldn't see anybody who looked as if they were following him. Perhaps there was more than one of them? He knew that experienced shadows never trailed their target, but always tried to position themselves ahead. He walked slowly, stopping frequently to look at shop windows. He hadn't been able to think of a better ploy than pretending to be a foreigner who was looking for suitable souvenirs to take back home with him. He crossed the broad Esplanade and walked down the street behind the government offices. He thought of hailing a taxi and asking to be taken to somewhere and then transferring to another one, but decided that would be far too easy a ruse for a pursuer to see through. No doubt whoever was following him. could very quickly establish who had used the city's taxis and where they had gone.

  He stopped at a window display of drab-looking clothes for men. He didn't recognise any of the people passing by behind him, whose reflections he could see in the glass. What am I doing, he wondered. Baiba, you should have told Mr Eckers how he could find his way to the church without being followed. He set off again. His hands were cold, and he regretted not bringing any gloves with him.

  On the spur of the moment he went into a cafe, and entered a smoke-filled room crammed with people, that smelt strongly of beer and tobacco and sweat, and looked round for a table. There wasn't an empty one, but he could see a vacant chair right at the back in a corner. Two old men, each with a glass of beer in front of him, were deep in conversation and merely nodded when Wallander pointed inquiringly at the chair. A waitress with damp patches under her arms shouted something at him, and he pointed at one of the beer glasses. All the time, he was keeping an eye on the entrance: would his shadow follow him in? The waitress came with his frothing glass. He gave her a note and she put his change on the sticky table. A man in a worn black leather jacket came in. Wallander watched him make his way to a group that seemed to have been waiting for him, and sit down. Wallander took a sip of beer and glanced at his wristwatch: 5.55 p.m. Now he would have to make up his mind how to proceed. The door to the lavatory was diagonally behind him - every time the door opened, he was assailed by the stench of urine. When he had half-emptied his glass, he got up and went to the lavatory. He found himself in a narrow corridor with cubicles on each side and a urinal at the end, lit by a single bulb. He thought there might be a back door he could use, but the corridor was closed off by a brick wall. That's no good, he thought: no point in even trying. How do you get away from something you can't even see? Unfortunately Mr Eckers will have unwelcome company when he goes to the concert. His inability to find a solution was irritating him. As he was standing at the urinal, the door opened and a man came in and locked himself in one of the cubicles.

  Wallander knew immediately that it was somebody who'd arrived at the cafe* after him - he had a good memory for faces. He didn't hesitate, knowing he would just have to risk making a mistake. He hurried back through the smoky cafe* and out the door. Out in the street, he looked round, peering into doorways, but could see no one. Quickly he retraced his steps, turned into a narrow alley and ran as fast as he could until he emerged once more into the Esplanade. A bus was standing at a stop, and he managed to board it just before the doors closed. He got off at the next stop without having been asked for the fare, left the main road and went down one of the numerous alleys. He paused in the light from a street lamp to check the map. He still had some time, and he ducked into a dark entrance to wait. For the next 10 minutes nobody he judged to be a possible shadow went by. He knew he might still be being watched, but he reckoned he had now done all he could.

  He reached the church just before 7 p.m. It was already quite full, but he found a space by one of the side aisles, and watched the people still streaming into the church. He couldn't see anyone who might be his shadow, and nor could he see Baiba Liepa.

  The sound of the organ shocked him. It was as if the whole church was about to be shattered by the sheer power of the music. Wallander remembered an occasion when, as a child, his father had taken him to church. The organ music had frightened him so much that he'd burst into tears. Now, he recognised something soothing in the music. Bach has no homeland, he thought. His music belongs everywhere. Wallander let the music seep into his consciousness.

  Murniers might have been the one who phoned Major Liepa. Something the major said when he got back from Sweden might have driven Murniers to silence him swiftly. Major Liepa might have been ordered to report for duty. He might even have been murdered at the police station itself.

  He was suddenly shaken out of his train of thought by the sensation of being watched. He looked to either side of him but could see only faces concentrating on the music.

  In the broad central choir all he could see was people's backs. He continued looking round until his gaze reached the aisle opposite.

  There was Baiba Liepa, in the middle of a pew, amidst a group of old people. She was wearing her fur hat, and looked away once she was certain Wallander had recognised her. For the next hour he tried to avoid looking at her again, but now and then he couldn't resist glancing in her direction, and he could see she was sitting with her eyes closed, listening to the music. Wallander was overcome by a feeling of unreality. Only a few weeks ago her husband had been sitting on his sofa while they'd listened to Maria Callas singing in Turandot, with a blizzard raging outside the windows. Now he was in a church in Riga, the major was dead, and his widow was sitting with her eyes closed, listening to a Bach fugue.

  She must know how we're going to get away from here, he thought. She chose the church as a meeting place, not me.

  When the concert was over everyone stood up to leave immediately, and there was a bottleneck at the exit. The rush astonished Wallander. It was as if the music had never existed, and the congregation was trying to flee from a bomb scare. He lost sight of Baiba Liepa in the crush, and allowed himself to be carried along by the crowd. Just as he reached the porch, he caught sight of her in the shadows of the north transept. He saw her beckoning to him, and turned away from the throng of people elbowing their way towards the door.

  "Follow me," she said. Behind an ancient burial vault was a narrow door, which she opened with a key bigger than her hand. They emerged into a churchyard, she looked around quickly, then hurried on through the decrepit headstones and rusty iron crosses. They left the churchyard through a gate into a back street, and a car with its lights off started its noisy engine, and they scrambled in. This time Wallander was certain the car was a Lada. The man behind the wheel was very young and smoking one of those extra-strong cigarettes. Baiba Liepa smiled quickly at Wallander, shy and uncertain, and they drove out into a wide main thoroughfare Wallander guessed must be Valdemar. They continued north, past a park Wallander remembered from the tour he'd made with Sergeant Zids, and then turned left. Baiba Liepa asked the driver something, and received a shake of the head by way of reply. Wallander noticed the driver checked his rear-view mir
ror constantly. They turned left again, and suddenly the driver accelerated and made a U-turn. They passed the park again, and Wallander was now sure it was the Verman's Park; then they drove back towards the city centre. Baiba Liepa was leaning forward in her seat, as if giving the driver silent instructions by breathing down the back of his neck. They went along Aspasias Boulevard, passed another of those deserted squares, and crossed a bridge whose name Wallander didn't know.

  They came to a district of ramshackle factories and grim housing estates. They seemed to be going more slowly now; Baiba Liepa was leaning back in her seat, and Wallander assumed they were confident that nobody had managed to get on their trail.

  Minutes later they drew up outside a rundown, two-storey building. Baiba nodded to Wallander, and they got out. She led him swiftly through an iron gate, up a gravel path, and unlocked a door. Wallander heard the car driving off behind them. He entered a hall that smelt faintly of disinfectant, noting that it was lit by just one dim bulb behind a red cloth shade, and it occurred to him that they could well be at the entrance to a disreputable nightclub. He hung up his thick overcoat, put his jacket over the back of a chair, then followed her into a living room where the first thing he saw was a crucifix hanging on one wall. She switched on some lights, and all at once she seemed quite calm. She signalled him to sit down.

  Afterwards, long afterwards, he would be astonished to find he could remember nothing at all about the room in which he had his meetings with Baiba Liepa. The only thing that stuck in his memory was the black, metre-high crucifix hanging between two windows whose curtains were carefully drawn, and the lingering smell of disinfectant in the hall. But as for the worn armchair in which he sat, listening to Baiba Liepa's horrific story - what colour was it? He couldn't remember. It was as if they had talked in a room with invisible furniture. The black crucifix could just as well have been suspended in mid-air, held up by a divine force.

  She had been wearing a russet-coloured dress which he later learned the major had bought for her in a department store in Ystad. She had put it on in order to honour his memory, she said, and she'd also thought it would be a reminder of the crime she herself had suffered through the betrayal and murder of her husband. Wallander did most of the talking, asking questions which she answered in her restrained voice.

  The first thing they did was to do away with Mr Eckers.

  "Why that particular name?" he had asked. "It's just a name," she said. "Maybe there is such a person, maybe not. I made it up. It was easy to remember." At first she spoke in a way that reminded Wallander of Upitis. It was as if she needed time to close in on the point she may well have been frightened of reaching. He listened attentively, afraid of missing any implied significance -something he had discovered was a feature of Latvian society, but she confirmed Upitis's account of the struggle that was taking place in Latvia. She spoke of revenge and hatred, of a fear that was slowly starting to lose its grip, of a post-war generation that had been suppressed. It seemed to Wallander that she was anti-communist, of course, anti-Soviet, one of the friends of the West that, paradoxically, the Eastern bloc countries had always managed to produce to give succour to their imagined enemies. Nevertheless, she never resorted to making claims she could not support by detailed argument. He realised afterwards that she was trying to get him to understand. She was his teacher, and she didn't want to leave him in ignorance about the circumstances that lay behind the current situation, that explained the events of which it was too soon to establish an overall view. He realised that he had been far too ignorant of what was really going on in Eastern Europe.

  "Call me Kurt," he had said, but she shook her head and continued to keep him at the distance she'd settled on from the start. He would continue to be Mr Wallander.

  He had asked her where they were.

  "In a flat belonging to a friend," she told him. "To endure, and to survive, we have to share everything - the more so as we are living in a country and at a time when everyone is being urged to think only of themselves."

  "As far as I can see, communism is the opposite of that," Wallander said. "I thought it claimed that only things thought and carried out collectively were acceptable."

  "That's the way it used to be," she said. "But everything was different in those days. It might be possible to recreate that dream some time in the future, perhaps it's impossible to resurrect dead dreams? Just as once you're dead, you're dead forever."

  "What exactly happened?" he asked.

  At first she seemed not to understand what he meant, but then she understood that he was asking about her husband.

  "Karlis was betrayed and murdered," she said. "He had penetrated too far under the surface of a crime too massive, that involved too many important people, for him to be allowed to go on living. He knew he was living dangerously, but he hadn't yet been exposed as a defector. A traitor inside the nomenklatura."

  "He came back from Sweden," Wallander said. "He went straight to police headquarters to deliver his report. Did you meet him at the airport?"

  "I didn't even know he was coming home," she answered. "Perhaps he'd tried to phone, I'll never know. Maybe he'd sent a telegram to the police headquarters and asked them to inform me. I'll never know that either. He didn't call me until he was in Riga. I didn't even have the right food in to celebrate his return. One of my friends gave me a chicken. I'd only just finished preparing the meal when he turned up with that beautiful book."

  Wallander felt a little guilty. The book he had bought, in great haste and without much thought, was lacking in emotional significance. Now, when he heard her speaking of it like this, he felt as if he had deceived her.

  "He must have said something when he came home" Wallander said, painfully aware of the limitations of his English vocabulary.

  "He was elated," she said. "Naturally, he was also worried and furious; but what I shall remember above all is how elated he was."

  "What had happened?"

  "He said something had become clear at last. 'Now I'm sure I'm on the right track,' he said, again and again. Since he suspected our flat was bugged, he took me out into the kitchen, turned on the taps, and whispered in my ear. He said he had exposed a conspiracy that was so gross and so barbaric that you people in the West would finally be forced to recognise what was happening in the Baltic countries."

  "Is that what he said? A conspiracy in the Baltic states? Not just in Latvia?"

  "I'm quite certain of it. He often grew irritated because the three Baltic countries tend to be regarded as one entity, despite the big differences between them, but this time he wasn't only talking about Latvia."

  "He actually used the word 'conspiracy'?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you realise what was implied?"

  "Like everybody else, he'd known for a long time that there were direct links between certain criminals, politicians and even police officers. They protected each other in order to facilitate all kinds of criminal activity, and then shared the proceeds. Karlis himself had been offered bribes on many occasions, but he had too much self-respect to consider accepting any. For a long time he'd been working undercover, trying to track down what was happening and who was involved. I knew all about it, of course. I knew we lived in a society that was fundamentally nothing but a conspiracy. A collective philosophy of life had turned into a monster, and in the end the conspiracy was the only valid ideology."

  "How long had he been investigating this conspiracy?"

  "We were married for eight years, but he'd started those investigations long before we met." "What did he think he was going to achieve?" "At first, nothing more than the truth." "The truth?"

  "For posterity. For a time he was certain would eventually come. A time when it would be possible to reveal what had really being going on during the occupation."

  "So he was an opponent of the communist regime? In that case, how could he become a high-ranking police officer?"

  Her response was angry, as if he were guilty of s
erious slander of her husband.

  "But don't you understand? A communist is precisely what he was! What made him so disappointed was the massive betrayal! The corruption and indifference. The dream of a new kind of society that had been turned into a lie."

  "So he led a double life?"

  "You can hardly be expected to understand what that involves, year after year being forced to pretend you are somebody you are not, professing beliefs you abominate, defending a regime you hate. It didn't only affect Karlis, though. It affected me as well, and everybody else in this country who refused to give up the hope of a new world."

  "What had he discovered that made him so elated?"

  "I don't know. We didn't have time to talk about it. We had our most intimate conversations under the bedclothes, where no one could hear us."

  "He said nothing at all?"

  "He was hungry. He wanted to eat and drink wine. I think he felt that at long last, he could relax for a few hours. Give in to his feelings of elation. If the phone hadn't rung, I believe he'd have burst into song with his wine glass in his hand."

  She broke off, and Wallander waited. It occurred to him that he didn't even know whether Major Liepa had been buried yet.

  "Think back," he said gently. "He might have hinted at something. People who've made an important breakthrough can sometimes let slip something they don't intend to say."

  She shook her head. "I have thought," she said. "And I'm quite certain he didn't. Maybe it was something he'd learnt in Sweden? Maybe he'd worked out in his head the solution to a crucial problem?"

  "Did he leave any papers at home?"

  "I have looked. He was very careful, though. The written word could be far too dangerous."

  "Did he give anything to his friends? Upitis?"