Europa Blues Read Free

tightrope-walker along the beach, clutching them in his arms. One by one, they dropped down into the sand by the parasol, like enormous seeds being planted by a giant. The chalk-white man practically threw himself into the shade, as though he had been wandering lost in a radioactive area and finally come across a protective safe zone.
    The old fisherman wondered for a moment how five watermelons could be divided between seven people. Then he asked himself the inevitable question:
    Why travel to Italy, to the Tuscan coast, to Maremma, to Castiglione della Pescaia,
if you couldn’t bear the sun
?
    Not even Arto Söderstedt knew quite what to say to that. ‘Beauty’ wasn’t really a satisfactory answer for taking five children out of school during an important few weeks in spring. ‘Peace’ wasn’t quite enough of a reason for two adults to take months off from their jobs in the public sector either, particularly when, as with his wife, Anja, you were a tax inspector and the self-assessments had just come flooding in.
    So, of course, his conscience was there, picking holes in both the ‘beauty’ and ‘peace’ arguments. The only thing his conscience hadn’t reached was his own situation. Arto Söderstedt didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty at having temporarily left the police corps.
    The A-Unit, or the National Criminal Investigation Department’s Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Nature, had certainly been busy over the past year, but since the Sickla Slaughter case had reached its peculiar conclusion, the big, all-consuming cases had been noticeable in their absence. They had come extremely close to a disaster of huge international proportions during the Sickla case. But that was almost a year ago now, and time does have a tendency to heal old wounds.
    And so when the money came pouring in like manna from heaven, Arto Söderstedt didn’t hesitate for a second.
    Besides, he also felt
burnt out
, without quite understanding what that meant. Everyone was
burnt out
nowadays, everyone but him – mainly because he had never quite understood the meaning of it. He had probably been burnt out for years without having been any the wiser.
    It was his turn now, in any case. In the name of ‘beauty’ and ‘peace’, he allowed himself to tend to his burnout – regardless of whether it existed or not. And there was plenty of both in Tuscany, that much he knew after having been there only a few days.
    The family had rented a house in the Tuscan countryside, nestled among the vineyards. It wasn’t a villa – in Italy, a villa was something completely different to elsewhere – but a rustic little stone house on a pine-scented slope not far from the village of Montefioralle and the town of Greve. At the foot of the slope, the wine estates spread out like eternity’s own fields, as though the sky had split to make room for small pieces of paradise to fall down to earth and form an other-worldly patchwork quilt.
    Arto Söderstedt was enjoying it to the full – all while feeling oddly
unworthy
. It felt as though St Peter had fallen asleep just as a chalky-white detective inspector had slipped his slender body in through the gates of paradise. Thoroughly undeserved. He often found himself sitting on the porch, waiting in the nights with a glass of Vin Santo or a majestic Brunello di Montalcino washing over his taste buds. He had deliberately and uncritically devoured the whole Tuscany myth and he was enjoying himself enormously. He would never forget a single moment from his trip to Siena, that magical town. Even though the kids had howled away in the heart of the cathedral. Organ pipes was all he could think, watching those five little creatures standing there, in order of both height and pitch, screeching at the top of their lungs. Until a guard had decided that enough was enough and thrown the whole rabble out, that was. When that happened, Söderstedt had denied his paternity without a single pang