The following day would be Midsummer’s Eve. Although he didn’t feel great, he decided to go shopping. He didn’t like being in crowded supermarkets, didn’t really like shopping at all; but he had made up his mind that his midsummer table would be full of appropriate goodies. Sensibly, he had already stocked up on alcohol. He wrote out a shopping list and set off.
The following day he felt better, and his temperature was back to normal. It had rained during the night, but Wallander scanned the horizon and decided that they would be able to sit outside. When Linda and her family arrived at five o’clock, everything was ready. She congratulated him on his efficiency, and took him to one side.
‘There’ll be one extra guest.’
‘Who?’
‘Mum.’
‘No. I don’t want her here. You know what happened the last time.’
‘I don’t want her to be alone on a night like this.’
‘You can take her home.’
‘Don’t worry. Try to remember that you’ll be doing your good deed for the day by letting her be here.’
‘When’s she coming?’
‘I said five thirty. She’ll be here any minute.’
‘It’s your responsibility to make sure she doesn’t drink herself silly.’
‘Fair enough. Don’t forget that Hans likes her. Besides, she has a right to see her grandchild.’
Wallander said nothing more. But when he was briefly alone in the kitchen, he took a large swig of whisky to calm himself down.
Mona arrived, and all went well at the beginning. She had dressed up and was in a good mood. They ate, drank moderately and enjoyed the fine weather. Wallander noted how nicely Mona played with her grandchild. It was almost like seeing her with Linda again. But the peace didn’t last. At about eleven o’clock Mona suddenly started going on about all the injustices she had suffered in the past. Linda tried to calm her down, but evidently Mona had drunk more than they had realised. Maybe she had a little bottle hidden in her handbag. Wallander said nothing at first, merely listened to what she had to say. But there came a point when he couldn’t stand it any more. He banged his fist on the table and told her to leave. Linda, who wasn’t completely sober either, yelled at him to calm down, saying it wasn’t a big deal. But for Wallander it was a big deal. Now, after all this time, he finally noticed that he no longer missed Mona, and the realisation turned into an accusation. It was Mona’s fault that all those years had gone by without his being able to find another woman to live with. He left the table, took Jussi and stormed off.
When he came back half an hour later, the party was breaking up. Mona was already in the car. Hans, who had drunk only one glass of wine, would drive.
‘It’s a shame it turned out this way,’ said Linda. ‘It was a lovely evening. But now I know that Mona’s drinking will always lead to something like this.’
‘So I was right after all?’
‘If that’s how you want to put it. Maybe she shouldn’t have come. But now we know that she needs help. I didn’t realise until now that my mother is drinking herself to death.’
She stroked his cheek, and they embraced.
‘I’d never have survived if it hadn’t been for you,’ he said.
‘Klara will soon be able to spend time on her own here with you. In a year or so. Time passes quickly.’
Wallander saw them off and cleared away the leftovers and dirty dishes. Then he did something he did only once or twice a year: he dug out a cigar, sat down in the garden and lit it.
It was starting to get chilly. He began reminiscing. He thought about his former classmates, the ones he’d been at school with in Limhamn. What had they made of their lives? There had been a reunion a few years ago, but he hadn’t made the effort to attend. He regretted it now. It would have put his own life in perspective, seeing what had happened to them.
He sat outside until two. At one point he heard a snatch of music in the distance - it might have been that Swedish midsummer favourite ‘Calle Schewen’s Waltz’, but he wasn’t sure. Then he went to bed and slept until late the next morning. He stayed in bed, reading through the books he’d borrowed from the library. He suddenly sat up with a start. He had come to some black-and-white photographs in a book about American submarines and their constant trials of strength with their Russian counterparts during the Cold War.
He stared at the picture and could feel his heart beating faster. There was no doubt about it. The picture was an exact likeness of the cylinder he had taken home with him from Boko. Wallander leaped out of bed and dragged the cylinder out from behind a bookcase he used for storing old shoes.
He grabbed an English- Swedish dictionary to make sure he didn’t misunderstand anything in the chapter that contained the photograph. It was about James Bradley, who was in charge of submarine command in the US Navy at the beginning of the 1970s. He was known for spending whole nights in his office in the Pentagon, working out new methods of dealing with the Russians. One night, when the building was more or less deserted except for the security guards patrolling the hallways, he had an idea. It was so daring that he knew immediately he would need to go directly to President Nixon’s security adviser, Henry Kissinger. There was a rumour circulating at the time that Kissinger seldom listened to anybody for more than five minutes and never for more than twenty. Bradley spoke for over forty-five minutes. When he drove back to the Pentagon he was convinced he would get the money he needed for the equipment he had in mind. Kissinger had promised nothing, but Bradley had seen that he was deeply impressed.
It was soon decided that the submarine Halibut would be used for this top-secret project. It was one of the biggest in the US submarine fleet. Wallander was astonished when he read about the weight, the length, the armaments and the number of officers and crew. There was no reason it couldn’t be operational year-round, provided it could surface occasionally to load up with fresh air and provisions. The food stores could be refilled in less than an hour in open water, but in order to fulfil its new assignment it needed to be refitted. It had to be provided with a pressure chamber for divers, who would perform the most difficult part of the assignment, deep down at the bottom of the sea.
Bradley’s idea was basically very simple. In order to maintain communications between command bases on the mainland and the submarines armed with nuclear weapons out on patrol from bases in Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Russians had laid a cable over the Okhotsk Sea. Bradley’s plan was to attach a listening device to it.
But there was a big problem. The Okhotsk Sea was over two hundred thousand square miles in area; how would they ever locate the cable? The solution was just as improbably simple as the whole idea.
One night in the Pentagon, Bradley remembered the summers he used to spend as a child by the Mississippi River. That childhood memory solved his problem. At regular intervals along the bank there were notices saying: ‘Anchoring Forbidden. Underwater Cable.’ Apart from the town of Vladivostok, eastern Russia was pure wilderness, so there couldn’t be very many places where an underwater cable could be laid. They have warning notices even in the Soviet Union.
Halibut set off and crossed the Pacific Ocean undersurface. After an adventurous voyage with several sonar contacts with Russian submarines, they managed to enter Russian territory. Then came one of the most risky moments of the operation, when they needed to sneak into one of the channels between the Kuril Islands. Thanks to the fact that the Halibut had been fitted with the most advanced equipment for detecting minefields and sonar links, they succeeded. They located the cable relatively quickly. The problem then was to connect the bugging device to the cable without the Russians’ noticing. After several attempts they finally succeeded, and on board the submarine they could listen in on all messages from the mainland to the Russian submarine captains, and vice versa. As thanks, Bradley was granted an interview with President Nixon, who congratulated him on the success of the operation.
Wallander went outside and sat
down in the garden. There was a cold wind blowing, but he found a sheltered spot next to the house. He had released Jussi, who disappeared behind the back of the house. The questions he now asked himself were few and straightforward. How had one of those bugging cylinders found its way into a Swedish shed behind a boathouse? How was it linked with Hakan and Louise von Enke? This whole business is bigger than I ever imagined, he thought. There is something behind their disappearance that I don’t have the information to understand. I need help.
He hesitated, but not for long. He went back inside and called Sten Nordlander. As usual the connection was bad, but with some effort they were able to understand each other.
‘Where are you?’ Wallander asked.
‘Just off Gavle, in the Gavlebukten. South-westerly breeze, light cloud cover - it’s spectacular! Where are you?’
‘At home. You need to come here. I found something you should look at. Take a flight.’
‘It’s that important, is it?’
‘I’m as certain as it’s possible to be. It’s somehow connected with Hakan’s disappearance.’
‘I must say I’m curious.’
‘There’s a chance I’m wrong, of course. But in that case you can be back on your boat tomorrow. I’ll pay for all your tickets.’
‘That’s not necessary. But don’t count on seeing me before late tonight. It’ll take me a while to sail back to Gavle.’
It was six o’clock when Nordlander called back. He’d got as far as Arlanda, and would be catching a flight from Stockholm to Malmo an hour later.
Wallander got ready to pick him up. He let Jussi stay in the house - his presence would no doubt deter any possible intruders.
The flight landed on time. Wallander was waiting in the arrivals hall when Nordlander emerged. They drove back to Wallander’s house to examine the mysterious steel cylinder.
19
Sten Nordlander recognised immediately the steel cylinder Wallander had lifted up onto the kitchen table. He hadn’t seen the genuine article before, but he had seen a lot of sketches, plans and pictures that enabled him to identify it.
He made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was astonished. Wallander decided there was no longer any reason to maintain the cat-and-mouse game with him. If Nordlander had been Hakan von Enke’s best friend while he was alive, and if the worst-case scenario turned out to be reality, he could also be his best friend in death. Wallander served coffee and told his guest the full story of how he had obtained the cylinder. He left nothing out, beginning with the photo of the two men and the fishing boat and finishing only when he explained how he had been able to identify the cylinder they had dragged out of the dark shed on Boko.
‘I don’t know what you think,’ Wallander said in the end. ‘Whether it was worth the trip from Gavle.’
‘It certainly was,’ said Nordlander. ‘I’m as mystified as you are. This isn’t a dummy. Maybe I can see some sort of connection.’
It was past eleven. Nordlander declined the offer of a full meal and said he’d be satisfied with a cup of tea and some biscuits. Wallander had to spend some time ransacking the pantry before he finally found a packet of oatcakes. Most of them had broken and were not much more than a heap of crumbs.
‘It’s tempting to keep talking now,’ said Nordlander, ‘but my doctor tells me I must go to bed at a decent hour, whether or not alcohol is involved. I’m afraid we’ll have to continue tomorrow. Let me just have a look through the book where you found the photograph before I go to sleep.’
The next day was warm, with no wind. A hawk hovered over the edge of a neighbouring field. Jussi was fascinated and sat motionless, watching the bird. Wallander had been up since five o’clock, impatient to hear what Sten Nordlander had to say.
At seven thirty Nordlander emerged from the guest room. He gazed out of the window at the garden and the vista beyond, obviously impressed.
‘The myth is that Skane is a flat and rather lifeless landscape,’ he said. ‘But this strikes me as much more than that. It feels to me like a gentle swell out at sea. And beyond it the waves.’
‘I see it in much the same way,’ Wallander said. ‘Dark, dense forests scare me to death. This openness makes it hard to hide. We all need to hide sometimes, no doubt, but some people do it too often.’
‘Have you been thinking along the same lines as I have? That maybe, for reasons we know nothing about, Hakan and Louise have gone into hiding?’
‘That is always a possibility when you are looking for missing persons.’
After breakfast Nordlander suggested they go for a walk.
‘I have to do some exercise every morning. It’s the only way to get my digestive juices flowing.’
Jussi raced off in a flash towards the trees, where little pools always seemed to have something interesting for a dog to sniff at.
‘There were times at the beginning of the seventies when we seriously thought the Russians were as strong from a military point of view as they appeared to be,’ Nordlander began. ‘Their October parades were telling the truth, or so it seemed. Thousands of military experts sat watching television images of armoured vehicles rolling past the Kremlin, and the most important question they were asking themselves was: What is it that we can’t see? That was when the Cold War was at its height, you could say. Before the spell broke.’
They stopped at a ditch where an improvised footbridge had collapsed. Wallander found another plank that was less rotten, and put it in place so that they could continue on their way.
‘“The spell broke,”’ Wallander repeated. ‘My old colleague Rydberg used to say that when a line of inquiry turned out to be completely wrong.’
‘In this case it was our realisation that the Russian defence forces were not as strong as we’d thought. It was a worrying insight that gradually dawned on those whose job it was to solve jigsaw puzzles using all the pieces of information gathered from spies, U-2 planes, or even everyday television. The Russian military, at all levels, was worn out and in many cases nothing more than an impressive-looking but empty shell. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, there was a very real and powerful threat of a possible nuclear attack. But just as the whole economic set-up was rotting away, so was the incompetent bureaucracy. The party no longer believed in what it was doing, and the defence forces were also disintegrating. That naturally gave the top brass in the Pentagon and NATO, and even in Sweden, a lot to think about. What would happen if it became public knowledge that the Russian bear was in fact no more than an aggressive little polecat?’
‘Presumably the threat of doomsday would be reduced?’
Nordlander seemed almost impatient when he answered.
‘Military men have never been especially philosophical by nature. They are practical people. Hiding inside every competent general or admiral is nearly always a pretty good engineer. Doomsday wasn’t the most important question as far as they were concerned. What do you think it was?’
‘Defence expenditure?’
‘Right. Why should the Western world continue to be on a war footing if their main enemy was no longer a threat? You can’t find a new enemy of similar proportions just like that. China and to some extent India were next in line. But at that time China was still a non-starter in military terms. The core of their armed forces was still an apparently endless supply of soldiers to deploy at any given moment. But that wasn’t sufficient motivation for the Western world to continue developing advanced weapons designed exclusively for the arms race with Russia. So there was suddenly a major problem. It simply wasn’t appropriate to reveal what everybody knew, that the Russian bear was now limping badly. It was essential to make sure the spell didn’t break.’
They came to a little hillock with a view of the sea. The previous year Wallander and Linda had carried there an old wooden bench she had bought at an auction for practically nothing. Now he and Nordlander sat down. Wallander shouted for Jussi, who clearly didn’t want to join them.
‘What we
’re talking about took place when Russia was still a very real enemy,’ Nordlander went on. ‘It wasn’t only at ice hockey that we Swedes were convinced we’d never be able to beat them. We were certain that our enemies always came from the East, and hence we needed to be very aware of whatever they were up to in the Baltic Sea. It was around that time, at the end of the 1960s, that rumours started flying.’
Nordlander looked around, as if he were afraid that somebody might be listening to their conversation. A combine was busy close to the main road to Simrishamn. Now and then the distant buzz of traffic drifted up to the hillock.
‘We knew that the Russians had a big naval base in Leningrad. And they had quite a few more bases, more or less secret, dotted around the Baltic Sea and in East Germany. We in Sweden weren’t the only ones blasting our way down into the rocks underneath the Baltic Sea. The Germans had been doing it even during the Hitler period, and the Russians continued in the same tradition after the swastika had been replaced by the red flag. A rumour spread that there was a cable over the bottom of the Baltic Sea, between Leningrad and their Baltic satellites, that handled most of their important electronic messages. It was considered safer to lay your own cables than to risk your messages being intercepted by others listening in to radio traffic. We shouldn’t forget that Sweden was deeply involved in what was going on. One of our reconnaissance planes was shot down at the beginning of the fifties, and nowadays nobody has any doubt that they were spying on the Russians.’
‘You say the cable was a rumour?’
‘It was supposedly laid at the beginning of the 1960s, when the Russians really believed that they could match the Americans and maybe even outdo them. Don’t forget how put out we were when the first Sputnik started cruising around up there in space and everybody was amazed that it wasn’t the Yanks who had launched it. There was some justification for the Russian view. It was a time when they nearly caught up with the West. Looking back, if you want to be cynical, you could say that was when they should have attacked. If they had wanted to start a war and bring about the doomsday scenario you talked about. In any case, it’s rumoured that there was a defector from the East German security forces, a general with a chest full of medals who had acquired a taste for the good life in London, and he is supposed to have revealed the existence of the cable to his British counterpart. The British then sold the information for a staggering amount to their American friends, who were always sitting at the ready with their hand held out. The problem was that they couldn’t send the really advanced US submarines through the Oresund because the Russians would have detected them immediately. So they had to find less conspicuous methods - mini-submarines and so on. But they didn’t have precise information. Where exactly was the cable? In the middle of the Baltic Sea, or had they chosen the shortest route from the Gulf of Finland? Perhaps the Russians had been even more cunning and laid it near Gotland, where nobody would have expected to find it. But they kept on looking, and the intention was to attach to it the sister of that bugging cylinder they had already placed off Kamchatka.’
The Troubled Man (2011) kw-10 Page 21
