The Best Book in the World

CHAPTER 14

Serial Salvador


Serial Salvador. He had seen the name on the placards for several weeks now. It was repulsive. A way of simplifying and uglifying. His task was much more beautiful than that. His art would not fit on a newspaper placard. His art would not fit in a museum or an art hall. They would get to see. They would feel it.

Sure, there had been artists before him who had worked in his spirit. The American photographer Andres Serrano, for example: his photos of dead people in mortuaries were dazzlingly beautiful. Murdered gang members and innocent mugging victims. Naked, broken, bloody and seductive. Serrano’s pictures were hated by some, loved by others. But was it art? Wasn’t it simply documentation of the art works of others? Somebody had killed another person deliberately, perhaps for revenge or some other desire.

It must surely be the person who triggers the experience who is the artist, not the one who experiences it, looks at it or just consumes it? Serrano portrayed experiences, he didn’t create them. Did that make him an artist? Or was he just a tool in the service of the murderers? A paintbrush, a canvas, a palette with paint. Yes, it must have been the murderers who were the real originators.

Serial Salvador. He sniffed at the name. No, he would once and for all rub out the boundary between moral and immoral, between art and reality. When the crime-scene technicians from the police took pictures of his installations, those works of art became eternal. The police became Serrano-clones, obedient tools in his service. Without understanding it themselves, they became artists, public and critics at one and the same time. Shocked and in despair, they stood there and lit up his installations with their camera flashes. Dead and mutilated bodies hung up on weird crutches in the strangest of places. Men, women and children, nobody escaped. When the photos were subsequently spread between colleagues, prosecutors and media leaks, the whole world became his art hall. The guardians of morality became the foremost apostles of immorality. His art was spread at the speed of light via TV, radio, the Internet and newspapers.


The person who spread it most and best of all was that slimmed-down H?kan Rink, who presided over press conferences and theorised about his offender profiles. It was repulsive. Repulsively delightful.

The days pass in the sign of mass murder. Titus has full sail. He is relaxed and writes at a furious pace.

Better to be obsessed than dependent.

Serial Salvador hangs people up on crutches.

Chief Inspector H?kan Rink is right on his tail.