Strindberg's Star (6 page)

“And they don’t even have their own
reporter
on site here in Falun,” she had concluded.

After he’d slunk away from the morning meeting, the intern had shut the door to his own office and fallen into his swivel chair. He felt like he was going to throw up. Reluctantly he realized that he should probably give up, and went to go tell the news director.

The director was on the balcony smoking. When he saw the intern walking toward him, he held up a small piece of blue paper against the glass. On the paper was a scribbled telephone number. The news director’s mouth let out a puff of smoke and then formed one word: “Call.”

The intern sat dejectedly at the edge of the desk, pulled the beige push-button phone out of the mess, and dialed the number. After a few rings, a sharp, piercing voice answered.

“So
you
were the one who wrote the article in today’s
Dalakuriren
? Well, you can expect anything at all from the evening papers … but that our own
morning paper
would start speculating about murders and Nazism and pagan rituals and I don’t know what else … that is truly deplorable.”

The intern mumbled something about how it was unfortunate that the reader thought so, but there
were
those lines about Niflheim and Náströndu and not least, a murdered guy in a mine.

“A ‘guy,’ you say,” said the surly voice.

“Yes, that part in particular is something the police have made quite clear,” said the intern.

“Now, it just so happens that I
know
someone who has actually seen this ‘guy’ you’re talking about,” said the voice.

The intern clutched the phone to his ear and grabbed a coffee-stained notebook.

“You … you mean you know someone who’s seen the murder victim? Does he know who it is, can he identify the man, is it someone from Falun?”

“Well, I
really
have no intention of going into any details, but you can think of it as a tip in case you’re entrusted with writing more about this in the future. I have a friend, a
close
friend, who happens to be a
pathologist
at Falu Hospital. And from what he’s said about the autopsy of the ‘guy,’ this case is totally unique. Or more accurately: The case is
almost
unique.”

“I don’t really understand what you mean.”

“Vitriol,” said the voice.

“Sorry?”

“Copper vitriol.”

The intern wrote down the words, circled them, and added three question marks.

“Copper vitriol, you said … ?”

“You’re not even from Dalarna, huh?” the voice said and hung up.

When the news director came back in from the balcony, the intern was still holding the silent phone.

“So what was it about?”

“It was some reader who wanted to talk about copper,” said the intern.

“They’re fucking nuts, the whole lot, everyone who calls.”

“So I … ?”

“You’ve started off with this story, so now handle it.”

T
he first thing the intern did when he returned to his office was try for about the hundredth time to get hold of Erik Hall.

The picture of the diver was all over the Internet now, and every Swedish journalist seemed to have gotten an interview.

Then, on the fifth ring, when he had almost given up:

“Hall?”

“Oh, it’s just the local paper. Hey, can’t you call later this week, there are so many people calling right now.”

“But we would really like …”

“Wait,
Dalakuriren
… ?” Hall’s voice changed. “Weren’t you the one who claimed that I had said something about it being a woman down there? A little girl? In that case you don’t need to call at all, you with your shitty journalism.”

Again the intern was sitting with a silent phone in his hand.

He looked dejectedly down at the first page of the notebook. There, circled in black ink, it just said:

Copper vitriol???

The phrase “copper vitriol” got thirty-three hits in
Dalakuriren
’s index of articles, and apparently it was something you ought to have heard of if you worked at a local paper in Falun.

He began to read the first fragment of a sentence that the search engine had found:

According to the article, the man’s real name had been Mats Israelsson, a twenty-year-old mine worker who had lost his way and disappeared in Great Copper Mountain. It had happened one March evening, just before Easter, when he had just become engaged to a woman named Margareta Olsdotter.

The intern rubbed his temples. In March of 1677, no one had spent much time on large-scale search-and-rescue operations in order to find one isolated missing mine worker. The only one who hadn’t given up was Mats’s fiancée, Margareta, who would have time to become aged and bent during her search.

She had been waiting for forty-two years when by chance, in 1719, a team of miners had found a dead man at a depth of 480 feet. He had been lying in something called the Mårdskinn shaft, in a hole filled with water and …
copper vitriol!

The intern’s eyes came to a halt. He read on:

The deceased had looked as though he had drowned very recently, and his body was still completely soft. Those who had found him were surprised, because no one had been reported missing in the mine recently, and moreover, this particular shaft had been closed off since the great mine collapse of 1687.

Once they had managed to carry him up into the daylight, their confusion increased—no one was able to recognize the dead man’s face. What they had before them was a large young man of about twenty, heavy and in good health (other than being dead) and with a body that seemed completely untouched by the passage of time. A week or so later, when there was a mine meeting and the corpse was displayed, an old woman stood up, shaking with sobs.

Margareta Olsdotter had immediately recognized her betrothed, and three of the mine worker’s elderly friends also identified the dead man as Mats Israelsson. It had been recorded in the minutes of the mine meeting that the only thing that distinguished the youth who had gone down into the mine in 1677 from the one who had come up in 1719 was his hair, which had continued to grow after his death, meter after meter, shiny, wavy, and black.

“This is starting to seem like García Márquez,” the intern mumbled. But at the next paragraph he stiffened.

The key to the puzzle had been
the high levels of copper vitriol
in the air and water in the Mårdskinn shaft.

Copper vitriol had long been known for its ability to preserve lumber—among other things, it was used as an ingredient in Falu red paint. Now it kept a corpse from rotting for forty-two years.

The intern had a dry feeling in his mouth. What was it that the Stockholm policeman had said again?
The deceased has been down
in the mine for several days, and maybe much, much longer
. He scrolled further:

Mats Israelsson’s body had been so well preserved that it hadn’t even decayed when it was lifted to the surface. Year after year, the vitriol-brined skin had remained just as soft. The Royal Board of Mines had become so fascinated with the case that they had exhibited the youthful corpse for general viewing as a matter of curiosity. At first Mats Israelsson had been kept in a barrel; after that, when public pressure had increased, he had been propped up vertically in a glass case. Mats stood there outside the mine, staring at the visitors for thirty years; even the famed “father of taxonomy,” Carl Linnaeus, came to see him.

Each year the case had been opened to cut the growing hair on his head, but otherwise the mine worker had been left alone. Finally, in 1749, some kind-hearted clergyman had buried Mats Israelsson’s body under the floor inside Stora Kopparberg Church. But …

The intern started to feel impatient.

… in the beginning of the 1860s, when the church floor was being relaid, Fet-Mats had been found again, his appearance still just as youthful. This time his body was placed in a wooden box and put aside in the main office of the mine. The mine worker stood there collecting dust until 1930. Then he was buried one last time, and was given a granite memorial.

When the body was placed in the coffin, more than 250 years had passed since that March day in 1677, but Mats Israelsson’s eyes had still been open and clear. Some said that there was something in his eyes that expressed a vague amazement. Others maintained that the only thing you could see in the miner’s eyes had been centuries of sorrow.

T
he intern added a short sentence in the notebook:

In that case, how would the police go about finding out who the murder victim was?

The intern sat for a long time, thinking, chewing his pen until it broke; he sighed at his own incompetence. Then he simply typed the words “post mortem identification” into the search engine on the Net and looked at the hits sullenly.

The first one was about some advice from the Medical Products Agency about identifying unknown tablets and capsules. Scrolled. There, down a bit: “Blood banks help identify victims of tsunami,” an old news article. He clicked on it and read:

Dental records.
There it was. They searched dental records, of course.

The intern felt his headache fade slightly. Here he actually had his very own source: the dad of an old friend from high school, who ran a private dental practice at Karlaplan, in the posh part of Stockholm.

He dug out the number, called, and ended up at reception. Just after he’d been transferred, he could hear the whistle of a dentist drill slowing down.

“Dental records? Listen … we have nothing to do with those. That’s handled by specialists at the National Board of Forensic Medicine … and I have no idea how far back their registry goes.”

His friend’s dad sounded a bit stressed.

“So how do you contact the specialists, then?”

The sound of steps, as the dentist walked away from the phone; then a door closed.

“Well … you’ll have to call them, I guess.”

The intern sighed.

“No, wait … Listen! There’s actually a guy I happen to know a little up at the National Board—he was pretty strange even when we were at school …”

“Yes?”

“If you want, maybe I could check with him when I’m finished?”

It was less than half an hour before the dentist called back with an excited voice:

“Listen to this. The Falun police, along with the help of the national police, have requested the dental records of every Swede who has disappeared or been missing all the way back to the midfifties. They haven’t had a single match. They also requested help from Interpol for an international search. Nothing there, either. Apparently the National Board has established that it could be a case of a corpse from who knows how far back … They said something about the body being really abnormally well preserved. I don’t know if I really understood, but it was something about the salts in the mine that stopped the body from rotting; it was only the hair that …”

“Did they say anything else?”

The intern had already begun to write.

“Yes, apparently he had pretty strange clothes on too, coarse fabric, a suit with a vest, a shirtfront with a separate collar. No ID or driver’s license or loyalty card, nothing. You know, they actually said that the police haven’t found a single object made of plastic on that guy. Ivory shirt buttons, pants buttons made of horn, shoe soles that were made of some sort of natural rubber.”

“Maybe he’d been kidnapped from a house in Östermalm. Old money and wealth,” said the intern with the phone tucked under his chin, writing with both hands now.

T
he next morning—
Dalakuriren
’s leading news:

DALAKURIREN EXPOSES
THE SECRET POLICE INVESTIGATION

Then came the introduction, with the intern’s name in a bold byline:

It was still as cold in the clearing as the intern remembered from last time. It was as though the fog and the cold were somehow rising up from the shaft opening itself, followed by the stench of the underworld.

As the rescue-service pump began to work, the nauseating smell became even worse. The horde of journalists began to move back as the water was sucked noisily into the colossal cylinder tank.

At lunchtime the forensics team rappelled down into the drained tunnels and began their work.

Quite soon, as the police spokesman would later explain to the intern and the other journalists, they had come across a pile of newspaper, sticky with copper vitriol.

The pile had been near one of the mine walls in what the evening papers had called the hall of murderers. It was still possible to read one of them; narrow columns with headlines in smeared black type:

Farther down: