The Assignment

by Per Wahlöö

  This simplified reasoning was no help to him.

  He was afraid.

  Why could he not be like Behounek?

  Or Sixto?

  Why could he not hate with the ideological, orthodox person’s conscious and powerful hatred?

  Manuel, where have your compromises landed you now? What is the formula for a compromise between fire and water? Steam. Yes, of course.

  Suddenly he sat straight up in the dark. Cramped, sweaty grip on the revolver butt. Aimed in the dark.

  He had heard steps and someone moving by the door.

  Then rustling, chewing, and throat clearing, Fernández. He fell back against the damp pillow.

  Then the voices came out of the darkness.

  “You’re a traitor and to get rid of you is a matter of national interest.”

  “You filthy, lousy pervert of a swine. Do you know what we do to Indian-lovers …”

  “And it’s impossible to protect you, Ortega. I’m telling you this as a professional man.”

  “They’re crazy; they’ll try to kill you, if only for the pleasure of it …”

  “Manuel … be careful … they mean it.”

  “Anyone who betrays us, does so only once …”

  “It would surprise me if you were still alive this time tomorrow.”

  “True, we didn’t kill the previous Resident, but that wouldn’t stop us …”

  Voices, voices, voices.

  At twenty to six his eyelids closed. His right hand slipped down toward the edge of the bed and the Astra slid out of his grip. It fell against the chair and then to the floor with a clatter.

  A second later the door was open and Fernández had thrown himself into the room, hunched-up and wild-eyed, but several minutes had gone by before he realized what had happened.

  He put the revolver back on the chair, stood in the half light, and looked down at the man on the bed. He shook his head.

  “Poor devil,” he said.

  Manuel Ortega heard nothing and did not move. But he was not really sleeping; he had fainted and was unconscious.

  Two steps across the corridor, left hand on the doorknob, right on the revolver, ice in his heart. Fernández on the chair, cramp in his midriff.

  Pale, with dark circles under his eyes, Manuel Ortega went into his office.

  He avoided the window, and went on into the next room. Danica, in a red dress, thinner and better cut, lower at the neck.

  Thank God. He nearly said it aloud. A normal thought for the first time in hours.

  She noticed and looked up at him. She smiled, thoughtfully. He remembered his face in the mirror and knew why.

  He stood behind her and had forgotten that he might suddenly die without having had time to find out what she had been about to say.

  “I didn’t have a good night either,” she said. “I shouldn’t have bothered about that idiot López, but should have stayed here.”

  López had implied that she might be in the way.

  “Well, no one can stop me from staying tonight. I’ve even brought some things with me,” she said, kicking her bag.

  “Were you alone last night?”

  “Yes,” she said seriously. “When it begins to get like this, then I’m either with the person with whom it begins to get like this, or else alone.”

  “Nice dress,” he said lamely.

  “Mmm, but I don’t like it. I have to wear a bra with it.”

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “Mmm. But not so much now. And the biggest bruise in the history of erotica.”

  The telephone rang.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll take it.”

  He felt quite strong now and wanted to test his strength. The voice was low, almost whispering, and it was impossible to make out whether it belonged to a man or a woman.

  “Swine, it’ll happen soon now, within twenty-four hours, you don’t know when, how, or where, only that it’ll happen soon and it might be anywhere or any time, because I know, but I’m not saying any more except that within twenty-four …”

  He slammed down the receiver. It had not gone well. The test had failed.

  “Call Captain Behounek,” he snapped, and then he went out of the room.

  The churning had begun again.

  “What are you doing about these damned telephone calls anyway?” he said when Behounek was on the line.

  “Well, what the hell can I do? I’ve a list of twenty-six here on my desk. Of course I can put a man to writing reports and then they’ll get fined a piddling sum in about four or five months’ time.”

  “At least call them up and tell them off.”

  “I’ve done that in a couple of cases, in fact. But it’s stupid. There was one call which the boys listening in thought sounded especially dangerous. Do you know who it was? An eight-year-old child, son of a director of a bank. And do you know what the bank director said? Just this: The boy has got guts, anyhow.”

  “But you arrested that woman a week ago, the first evening I was here.”

  “The situation wasn’t the same then, and besides, that wasn’t true.”

  “Look, Captain Behounek.”

  “Wanted to make a good impression, you know. But I did call her up and tell her off. For that matter, what happened to those statistics I sent you?”

  “My man is working on them.”

  “Stop him at once. Hell, I should have told you several days ago but I forgot all about it.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything’s wrong. There isn’t a correct figure in the whole damned lot. I’ve got our own statistics here, worked on and finished. You can look at them when you like.”

  “What do you mean? Are you quite mad?”

  “Not at all. I told you, it was the first time. I didn’t know you and didn’t know what was going to happen.”

  “You really are astounding.”

  “Yes, I know. According to those statistics you got, we have fewer outbreaks of violence than anywhere else in the country. They were compiled on the orders of the Ministry when the question of international inspection came up, United Nations control and God knows what else. They were not even done here for that matter, but at the army statistical department. They’ll do for all countries and all climates. You only have to fill in the date and the time. Typical fixing.”

  Suddenly the conversation changed character.

  “Captain Behounek, you feel hatred, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I feel hatred.”

  “Why?”

  “You came with me to the Pérez house. If you’d seen the same thing fifty times before and sometimes much, much worse, then you’d feel hatred too.”

  “That’s no answer, only an evasion. Your own subordinates commit crimes which are just as bad.”

  “You don’t understand. All this stems from one and the same evil root.”

  “In Spain I heard tell of a doctrine which runs like this: Sometimes ignorance is so great that the teacher has to kill his pupils, for their own sake. Do you think like that?”

  “I’m a policeman and hence more of a doctor than a teacher. If you insist on metaphors then all I can say is this: It’s an ancient surgical rule that one cuts away flesh and tissue that have begun to decay before one extracts the bullet from the wound. Similarly, one must disinfect secondary infections before one can attack or even get at the seat of infection.”

  “But …”

  “Never mind about all that now. Follow my twelve points instead. How’s the conference situation?”

  “You’ll know in half an hour.”

  “Good. The water mains were in order a quarter of an hour ago, by the way. We can start having showers again.”

  The conversation was at an end. It could well have gone on longer. Danica and Behounek were now the only people who could distract him. The churning was starting up again. He stared at the maddeningly sauntering Fernández and said, shrilly and wildly: “Can’t you sit still, man?”

  �
��This,” said Fernández, “is not a good day.”

  The churning ground and ground in his diaphragm and in the lower part of his chest.

  Danica came in. Everything about the conference seemed to be falling into place. Preparations were being made. All clear from Ellerman. All clear from Irigo. All clear from Dalgren. All clear from Colonel Orbal. The apparatus was functioning. Army service personnel had begun to arrange things at Mercadal.

  All was well.

  Except one small detail. Manuel Ortega, who wanted only to live, but knew that they would kill him.

  His thoughts were in a tangle. Repetition, time and time again, of phrases such as: How shall I survive this day even if nothing happens? It’s still only eleven o’clock. All those hours. So long. So many.

  The weather was the same. The heat was terrific, the air white and molten. The fan whirred ineffectively, only driving yet more heat down from the ceiling. He drank pints of lemonade. He spoke to Ellerman three times. Once to Dalgren’s secretary. Once to Behounek.

  Twenty minutes to twelve. He was tired and frightened and soaked with sweat. The skin below his armpits and behind his knees had begun to sting. He thought about having a shower but decided it would be best to wait until López came. He did not want them to be changing guard while he was standing naked and defenseless in the shower.

  Gómez was standing in for Fernández and was loitering by the window with his short machine gun resting in the crook of his elbow. Now he’s looking across the great white square, thought Manuel. As he himself could not go over to the window, suddenly the dismal view of the palm trees and the empty blocks of apartments presented a burning temptation. But he thought too that as soon as he showed himself someone would pull the trigger of a rifle far away, perhaps from one of the roofs. He had heard that a skilled marksman could hit a target at nine hundred yards. If he had a good telescopic sight. He had also heard that one had time to hear the crack before the bullet landed, and even sooner one should be able to see the flash from the barrel. Perhaps one could even take all this in in the right order; the flash, the crack, the window shattering, and then—the bullet.

  He also wondered what it felt like to be shot. He had read somewhere that it was like being felled by a club or hit hard in the solarplexus.

  The churning ground on and on. Suddenly he was aware that what was being ground away in there was his strength of will and power of resistance, that all established values were being turned into pulp, that slowly but surely he was being filled with grist, was acquiring new and worthless entrails, gelatinous and useless.

  Manuel Ortega was blindly, mindlessly, afraid.

  He tried to say something but was not certain whether it would not emerge as a weak whisper. He cleared his throat slightly and said: “Gómez, what does it look like out there?”

  His voice was calm and steady.

  “Empty,” said the man at the window. “Three policemen and a cat.”

  The door opened and López came in. The man with the machine gun nodded and left.

  The sweat was running into Manuel Ortega’s eyes. He went to the woman and said: “The water is running. What about a shower?”

  “Someone had better stay here, though. We can take one in turns. You go first.”

  “I want to see the bruise,” he said childishly.

  “Tonight, my friend. You can see it tonight.”

  O.K., he thought, I’ll go first. Hope it doesn’t show too much what’s wrong with me. The churning ground on. His right leg seemed paralyzed. His heart had begun to trouble him.

  López searched the rooms.

  In the shower he thought how foolish it was to be afraid. There were police at the entrance and in the vestibule, and there was a policeman at the entrance to the corridor itself. Danica was in the room beyond his. It would be very difficult to get around one of these people without being observed. To pass two of them should be impossible.

  He stood under the shower for a quarter of an hour. When he went into the bedroom and saw the bed he suddenly thought that fear would make him impotent that night.

  Then he thought that this was definitely wrong, for if one believed that one was not going to be able to, then one would not be able to.

  He thought about this as he dressed.

  He took a long time over it and his face and neck were already sweaty before he was ready.

  In addition to the churning and the strange things his heart was doing, there was something wrong with his testicles, and his right leg felt dead and useless. There was a thumping in his head. He went back to the shower.

  Manuel Ortega ran cold water over his wrists, rinsed his face, and sponged the back of his neck with a wet towel. There was something wrong with his heart, as if it had been pumped up until it filled the whole of the left side of his chest.

  Then he drew a deep breath, went through the outer room, and, helplessly abandoned to his fear, thought: This is the ninth day and they really have a reason.

  He opened the door and saw López sitting on the swivel chair. Manuel smiled at his inertia, then opened the door and stepped over the threshold.

  A man was standing in the middle of the room.

  For a fraction of a second Manuel Ortega’s brain captured perhaps a hundred sounds and visual impressions and arranged them into a proper pattern. Not a man, but a child, perhaps seventeen years old, with a pale exalted face and frightened eyes, well-brushed black hair with a straight white side-part, and the gun held at face level. The gun stared at him with its black eye of death. Time stood still and perhaps in this last thousandth of a second he would have time to see the bullet’s shiny nose push its way out of the barrel. He did not know. But he knew, as he had always known, that his sense of security was false, a mere fiction, that the Astra was stuck under his left arm and would never leave its place, that he had known this every time he had opened this door before. He had known that López would never even have time to get up from the chair. He had known all the time that they would kill him, that Uribarri was right that time so terribly long ago, that they were all mad, even the children, for this was a child.

  Manuel Ortega had time to think and register all this during that last thousandth of a second. At the same time he thought of names and women, and small children and churches.

  Then everything was drowned in the pulsating roar from Frankenheimer’s Colt as the man in the linen suit out on the ledge pumped five shots through the closed window into the back of the child. An upright body with an outstretched arm jerked involuntarily three yards forward and hit the wall by the door, first with the gun and then with its face and chest and stomach and thighs, pulpy and dead, with a smack. It stayed there for a brief few seconds as if stuck against the wall, before sliding down to the floor.

  Manuel tottered feebly toward the doorway as López grabbed him by the collar and hurled him backward out into the corridor, and neither of them saw how Frankenheimer calmly knocked out the remains of the windowpane with the butt of his gun and climbed into the room. His hearing was the only sense that seemed to be functioning. Manuel Ortega sat down on a chair by the wall and listened to López and Frankenheimer.

  López: “How did he get in?”

  Frankenheimer: “It looks as if he got in last night and was here all day.”

  López: “Where?”

  Frankenheimer: “In the other room. Behind that folding screen. In that little niche where there are a few coats hanging up. He stood there waiting, a bit cramped of course, but he was quite small. Yes, and Gómez should have covered that niche.”

  López: “Gómez is an ass. I’ve always said so.”

  Frankenheimer: “Well. Depends how you look at it. He has his ideas sometimes. But the kid must have stood in the niche and waited for you to go out. Then he stood here waiting. That’s logical, isn’t it?”

  López: “Where were you then?”

  Frankenheimer: “Around. As always when something’s up.”

  López: “Is the girl dea
d?”

  Frankenheimer: “We haven’t checked on that, have we? But she’s lying on the floor. I saw that anyway.”

  López: “She’s alive, but doesn’t look too good. A lot of blood.”

  Frankenheimer: “He hit her with the butt of his gun. He wouldn’t dare shoot. We’ll carry her in and then we’ve got them both in one place.”

  López: “Has anyone phoned for an ambulance?”

  Frankenheimer: “The police. They’re fixing that. I think I can hear the sirens now. Or … no?”

  López: “Yes, I can hear. You fired a lot of shots.”

  Frankenheimer: “Well. There wasn’t much time and I had to catch the kid off balance. I didn’t think you were as quick as you usually are. You’d never have got him.”

  López: “One gets older.”

  Frankenheimer: “Yes, yes. But my shots landed where they should’ve. I didn’t dare risk breaking the window first. One really shouldn’t shoot through glass. Distortion and all that can deceive the eyes a bit.”

  López: “True, but it worked well this time.”

  Frankenheimer: “Yes, I think so.”

  López: “How long d’you think this job’s going to last, by the way?”

  Frankenheimer: “Don’t know. Hell, I’m beginning to get homesick. The old lady and the kids and all that.”

  López: “The girl doesn’t look so good. Pale.”

  Frankenheimer: “She’ll probably die.”

  * * *

  Manuel Ortega sat on the chair with his hands clasped and his elbows on his knees. He could see López and Frankenheimer and the two bodies on the floor, but in a strange light, unreal and as clear as glass, and he thought: I’m alive. Thank God. Thank Frankenheimer. Here lie two dead people but I’m alive.

  The sirens had fallen silent outside; steps in the corridor.

  Behounek came into the room. Lieutenant Brown was with him and a doctor and a photographer.

  “How are things, Ortega?”

  “I’m alive.”

  His voice was firm and clear.

  “I can see that, but you’re as white as—yes, as a corpse.”

  “Shock,” said the doctor. “I’ll give him an injection.”

  Behounek had walked over to the wall.