Bad Blood: A Crime Novel by Arne Dahl Page B

released his discomfort, and let out the ballast, a heavy chunk of frustration.
    “It was an assignment to write this obituary, not my choice,” he said with a glance over his shoulder. “And I’ve never felt like such a hypocrite. Hassel was part of Möller’s inner circle. They’re the ones who make the decisions, quite simply, a clique from the same generation and with the same values, which they think are the same ones as in the golden sixties but in fact are the diametrical opposite. They rabidly try to ring in
the sign of the times
, and they happily follow the shallowest trends, but their willingness to let outsiders into their inner circle is nonexistent. Hassel had power. He was allowed to write about whatever books he wanted, and he always chose things he didn’t understand, just so he could cut those authors off at the knees. All his aesthetic convictions date back to the sixties, and they’re based on the pretense that literature is, by definition, fraud. He wrote a theoretical Maoist manifesto and a few documentary novels in the seventies, but since then all his work has been based on raking people over the coals. It’s almost impossible to count the promising authors he’s single-handedly sunk.”
    Hjelm recoiled from the sudden, almost therapeutic oratory. He tried to change track: “And privately?”
    “After cheating on his wife for years, he left her for a young girl who allowed herself to be impressed by his so-called refinement. He knocked her up immediately—but when it was time for the birth, he took off for Gothenburg in order to fuck himself silly at the book fair. When he got back to Stockholm,
she
had left with their newborn son. After that he spent most of histime picking up impressed young girls who didn’t know that his refinement was just as transplanted as his hair. His performances at department parties and publishers’ parties are legendary; you can’t imagine them if you haven’t seen one.”
    Hjelm blinked in surprise. He stared down at the obituary and compared Bertilsson’s oral account of Lars-Erik Hassel’s deeds with his written one. A truly sulfurous, infernal abyss opened up between them. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have taken it upon yourself to write this.” He waved the sheets of paper.
    Erik Bertilsson shrugged. “There are assignments and then there are assignments. You just don’t say no to some of them, if you want even a shadow of a career. And I do want that.”
    “But surely there must be some critics who are somewhat on the up-and-up?”
    Bertilsson reprised his shrug. “Those are the ones who don’t earn any money. You have no idea what a tough business this is. Either you’re in or you’re out. There’s no in-between.”
    Hjelm could have said much more but didn’t. Instead he regarded Bertilsson for a moment. He thought of the revolutionary books he’d read in the past year and tried to find any connection at all with the two representatives of cultural life he had met today.
    It was impossible.
    He thanked Bertilsson and left him alone in the empty stairwell. Bertilsson didn’t budge.

7
    The long day trickled to its conclusion. Hjelm quite literally slipped into the subway car on a banana peel. After executing a graceful ballet step on his left ankle, he sat down and thoughtlesslycursed, using words of a crude nature, and for the entire journey to Norsborg he found himself pierced by the burning glare of an old woman.
    By the time they got to Mariatorget, he was able to ignore her. John Coltrane’s hypnotic sax haze carried him to another world—or rather, as he preferred to think of it, deeper into this one. A thought disrupted his universe of pure sound: maybe Lars-Erik Hassel’s character was not a completely negligible factor after all. Even if he couldn’t accept Bertilsson’s version as definitive, Hassel surely had quite a few skeletons in his closet, and conceivably they had risen again as vengeful spirits. Erinyes, he thought,