The Return of the Dancing Master(153)

She stood up slowly and took two steps to one side. From there she could cover both Lindman and Hereira. Lindman held his breath. Hereira didn’t seem to grasp at first what she had in her hand. When it dawned in him that it was a gun, he started to stand up, but he sat down again when she raised the pistol. Then she turned to Lindman.

“That was stupid,” she said. “Of both of us.”

She was pointing the gun at Lindman now. Holding it in both hands, steady as a rock.

“That was the receptionist at the hotel. She phoned to tell me that you had taken my key and gone into my room. And of course, I know I didn’t turn off the computer.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was pointless trying to talk himself out of the situation, but he had to try. He glanced at the window. No sign of Wigren. He could only hope. This time she had noticed his glance. Without lowering the gun she edged closer to the nearest window, but evidently saw no one outside.

“So you didn’t come on your own?” she said.

“Who do I have to bring with me?”

She stayed by the window. It struck Lindman that the face he’d found so attractive before now seemed sunken and ugly.

“There’s no point in lying,” she said. “Especially when you’re no good at it.”

Hereira stared at the gun in her hand. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“It’s just that Veronica is not what she pretends to be. She might devote part of her time to business deals, but she spends the rest of her life spreading the cause of Nazism throughout the world.”

Hereira stared at him in astonishment. “Nazism?” he said. “She is a Nazi?”

“She’s her father’s daughter.”

“Perhaps it’s better if I explain it myself to the man who killed my father,” said Veronica.

She spoke slowly and in perfect English, a person with no doubt about the justice of her cause. To Lindman, what she said was just as frightening as it was clear. Molin had been his daughter’s hero, a man she’d always looked up to and in whose footsteps she had never hesitated to follow. But she wasn’t uncritical of her father: he had stood for political ideals that were now out of date. She belonged to a new era that adapted the ideals championing the absolute right of the strongest, and the concepts of supermen and subhuman creatures adapted to contemporary reality. She described raw and unlimited power, the right of the strong few to rule over the weak and the poor. She used words like “unfit,” “subhumans,” “the poverty-stricken masses,” “the dregs,” “the rabble.” She described a world in which people in poor countries were doomed to extinction. She condemned the whole of Africa, with just a few exceptions where despotic dictators were still in charge. Africa was a continent that should be left to bleed to death, that should not be given aid, but isolated and allowed to die. The new age and new technology, the electronic networks, gave people like her the upper hand and the instruments they needed to consolidate their sovereignty over the world.

Lindman listened to what she had to say, persuaded that she was insane. She really did believe what she was saying. Her conviction was ineradicable and she really did have no inkling of how crazy she sounded, and that her dream could never come true.

“You killed my father,” she said. “You killed him, and therefore I’m going to kill you. I know that you didn’t leave here because you wanted to know what happened to Abraham Andersson. He was an insignificant person who had somehow found out about my father’s past. So he had to die.”

“Was it you who killed him?”

Hereira understood now. The man next to Lindman had just emerged from one lifelong nightmare only to land in a new one.

“There’s an international network,” Veronica said. “The Strong Sweden Foundation is a part of it. I’m one of the leaders, invisible in the background, but I’m also a member of the small group of people who run the National Socialist Network on a global level. Executing Andersson to be certain that he could never reveal what he knew was not a problem. There are plenty of people who are always ready to carry out an order, without question, without hesitation.”

“How did Andersson manage to discover that your father was a Nazi?”

“In fact it started with Elsa. An unfortunate coincidence. Elsa has a sister who was for many years a member of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra. She mentioned to Andersson, when he decided to move up here, that Elsa lived in Sveg and was a National Socialist. He started spying on her, and eventually on my father as well. When he began blackmailing my father, he signed his own death warrant.”