Bad Blood: A Crime Novel by Arne Dahl Page A

a sleeveless T-shirt, and baggy pants appeared.
    “The cops,” he said expressionlessly.
    “Yes indeed,” said the cops in unison, above their IDs. “May we come in?”
    “I guess it would be shooting myself in the foot to say no,” said Hassel Junior, admitting the two ex-heroes.
    It was a little studio with a kitchen nook. A frayed navy blue window shade kept the late-summer sun at bay. A computer spread a bluish flicker across the walls closest to the desk; otherwise the apartment was coal black.
    Chavez pulled the cord, and the window shade flew up with a squeak that was strongly reminiscent of the one Mörner had produced when Robert E. Norton kicked him in the rear. “This isn’t opened very often,” Chavez observed. “With a view like this, maybe you should look outside once in a while.” Beyond the window, Kungsklippan plunged down toward the junction between island and mainland.
    “Were you working?” Hjelm asked. “Your mom said you study literature.”
    Laban Jeremias Hassel squinted at the apparently violently attacking sun and smiled with indoor pallor. “The irony of fate …”
    “In what way?” Hjelm lifted an upside-down coffee mug from the tiny counter. He shouldn’t have done it—a whiff of the moldy fumes nearly flung him across the apartment.
    “My father was one of Sweden’s leading literary critics,” said Laban Jeremias, observing Hjelm’s actions indifferently. “Theirony is that I was born with a literary silver spoon in my mouth. But really, my interest in literature is a rebellion against my father. I don’t know if it’s possible to understand,” he added quietly, lowering himself onto a thready, 1960s-style lavender sofa.
    The furniture in the little apartment was both sparse and slovenly. Here lived a person without much interest in the outside world—that much was clear.
    “I think I understand,” said Hjelm, even if he couldn’t really reconcile Laban’s trendy appearance with the inner chaos that seemed to rule him. “Your view of literature is the exact opposite of your father’s.”
    “He never understood the importance of improving oneself,” Laban Hassel mumbled, contemplating a birch table that actually seemed to have rotted through. “Literature was and remained a decadent bourgeois phenomenon for my father. So he felt no need to learn about it. Just tear it apart. And that continued long after he himself had become the most bourgeois of the bourgeois.”
    “He didn’t like literature.” Hjelm nodded.
    Laban lifted his eyes to him for a moment with surprise. “I do,” he whispered. “Without it, I’d be dead.”
    “Your childhood wasn’t happy,” Hjelm continued in the same balanced, calm, certain tone.
A father’s tone
, he thought.
    Or a mediocre psychologist’s
.
    “He disappeared so soon,” Laban said, indicating that the situation wasn’t new for him. Many hours of therapy, it seemed, were behind him. He started over. “He disappeared so soon. Left us. And so he became a hero to me, a personal myth of this great, well-known, unapproachable thinker. And as I began to read books, he became more and more interesting, with absolutely no participation on his part. I decided to wait to read his works until I felt ready. Then I would read them, and everything would be revealed.”
    “And was it?”
    “Yes. But in the exact opposite way from what I had imagined. His whole cultural veneer was exposed.”
    “And yet you kept in touch up until the end?”
    Laban shrugged and seemed to fall into a trance. Then it came out. “I waited and waited for him to reveal something important, something crucial from the past. But it never came. He always managed to keep up a raw-but-warm tone between us. It felt like stepping right into the AIK locker room. Disgusting guy talk. No chinks in the armor. I waited for them in vain. Maybe they were there at the moment of his death.”
    “If I understand you correctly, your contact was extremely