Another Time, Another Life

by Leif G. W. Persson

  “Okay,” said Martinez, “drive around and pick me up at the next intersection, and I’ll bring home the bait.”

  She patted Holt on the shoulder before she got out of the car, stopped at the crosswalk, and then, after a quick glance in each direction for cars that weren’t there, crossed the street and disappeared around the corner out of their field of vision.

  “Linda is just unbelievable.” Mattei sighed. “She could get a job as a witch.”

  • • •

  Johansson did not get an appetizer, and it was his wife, Pia, who explained why he couldn’t.

  “I don’t care how many calories you’ve walked off. It’s completely meaningless if you’re going to stuff yourself with caviar and potato pancakes.”

  “No fish, please,” said Johansson, putting his head to one side and trying to look like a little boy from the great forests north of Näsåker in the province of Ångermanland.

  “You can have grilled beef and boiled potatoes,” his wife declared from behind a menu. “Doesn’t that sound good?”

  “What’s wrong with au gratin potatoes?” said Johansson, sounding whinier than he intended. Other than that they taste so much better? he thought.

  “They’re bad for you,” said his wife. “And because I love you so much I want to protect you from dangerous things. We’re very much alike in that regard, you and me,” she declared without raising her eyes from the menu.

  “Okay then,” said Johansson manfully. “Grilled beef, boiled potatoes, and a strong beer.”

  “What’s wrong with light beer?” his wife objected. “Or plain water for that matter?”

  “Don’t contradict me, woman,” said Johansson, “or I’ll order a shot of aquavit too.”

  “All right then,” she said. “Personally, I think I’ll have fish. And a glass of white wine.”

  “Fine by me,” said Johansson. “Have fish, dear.” You’re a woman, he thought.

  When the three investigators returned to the police station, Martinez took her beer can trophy—now bearing Helena Stein’s fingerprints—and disappeared to the tech squad to arrange the remaining practical matters.

  Mattei went back to her computer, and Holt sat down in the break room to have another cup of coffee while she pondered how she should proceed. At the same time her thoughts started wandering off again in a direction she didn’t like.

  Assume that she’s the one who did it, thought Holt, who had suddenly started having doubts in a situation where she reasonably ought to have been strengthened in her spontaneous conviction. Then we’re going to crush her for the sake of someone like Eriksson. What was it he’d said, that doorman at Eriksson’s office that she and Jarnebring had talked to more than ten years ago? That Eriksson was both the absolute smallest person and the absolute biggest asshole he had ever met. From the little she’d seen of Helena Stein, she didn’t seem to match that description, thought Holt.

  Boiled potatoes are actually not that bad, thought Johansson. Not if they are really fresh like the ones he’d just had. True, French new potatoes are not in a league with Swedish ones, but these were completely edible. What did you expect at this time of year, and what did the French know about potatoes anyway?

  “There was something I was thinking about,” said Johansson’s wife, looking at him with her spirited dark eyes.

  “I’m listening,” said Johansson. So you’ve finally woken up, he thought.

  “Is there someone who works with you named Waltin?” she asked.

  “Waltin,” said Johansson with surprise. “You mean Claes Waltin? A little dandy who used aftershave and pomade in his hair,” said Johansson. And a real little asshole if you ask me, he thought.

  “He was some kind of police superintendent,” said Johansson’s wife.

  “A deputy police superintendent,” said Johansson as he shook his head. “No, he’s not around anymore. He disappeared a long time ago. Why are you asking?”

  “Nothing special,” said his wife, shaking her head. “I went out with him a few times, but that was long before we met.” So you don’t really need to look that way, she thought.

  “No, he’s not around,” said Johansson. “He quit many years ago—I think it was in ’87 or ’88, a year or two after Palme was shot. Now I’m getting curious.” There’s something she’s holding back, he thought.

  “Is he still working with the police?” his wife asked.

  “No, not really,” said Johansson with surprise. “He’s dead.”

  “He’s dead?” she said, suddenly looking rather strange. “What did he die of?”

  “Yes,” said Johansson. “It was an odd little story. It happened several years after he quit the police force. I don’t know the details since I heard it only in passing, but it happened sometime in the early nineties—’92, ’93 maybe—four or five years after he quit. They say he drowned on a vacation in Spain. Did you know him well?” Good old retroactive jealousy. Still, she couldn’t have known him that well if she didn’t even know he was dead, thought Johansson.

  “Since you’re asking,” said Johansson’s wife. “I saw him four, five times actually. The first time I was out at a restaurant with a girlfriend. Then he called me and asked me to dinner at the same restaurant, and then I remember he got a little kiss in the doorway before we parted. He drove me home in a taxi. He was enormously attentive and polite. Not your typical Swedish man if I may say so. Well … we met a few more times—the last time was at his place. Then I stopped seeing him and he called me about ten times before he gave up.”

  “So why did you stop seeing him?” asked Johansson, thinking, Something here doesn’t add up, without really knowing why.

  “I found out he wasn’t a good person,” his wife answered, shrugging her shoulders. “So I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore and that was that.”

  “So what was wrong with him?” asked Johansson. Apart from the fact that he looked and acted as if he had a spruce twig stuck up his ass, he thought.

  “Forget about it now,” said his wife, shrugging her shoulders. You don’t want to know, she thought. “He just wasn’t my type,” she said. “Is that so strange?”

  “No,” said Johansson. The same sort of thing has happened to me too, he thought. “That has actually happened to me too,” he said, smiling.

  “He drowned, you say,” said his wife, suddenly looking extremely curious. “Are you absolutely sure?”

  “Sweet Jesus,” said Johansson. “Either you explain or we change the subject, okay? According to what I heard, our former colleague Waltin is said to have drowned during a vacation in Spain. I heard it in passing. I didn’t know the guy. I hardly ever met him. And from the little I saw and heard I didn’t like him. Is that enough?”

  “You don’t think he could have been murdered then?” asked Johansson’s wife, looking at him with curiosity.

  “Murdered?” said Johansson with surprise. “Why in the name of God should he have been murdered?”

  “Well,” said his wife, who didn’t appear particularly disheartened by Johansson’s reaction, “considering his old job and all that.”

  Sigh, thought Johansson. It must be all those mysteries she reads, but naturally he couldn’t say that.

  “The only motive I can think of is that he must have been careless about paying his tailoring bills, which really didn’t have anything to do with his job,” Johansson said, grinning.

  “I know what you mean,” said Johansson’s wife, and she smiled too.

  “And what’s that mean then?” said Johansson.

  “That it’s high time we change the subject,” said Johansson’s wife.

  She’s not only lovely to look at but also fun to talk with—she’s smart too, thought Johansson. As soon as they got home after their little Saturday excursion he called Wiklander and gave him yet another task: to find out what had really happened with former police superintendent Claes Waltin, since he was going to be talking with former colleague Persson about the other thin
gs Johansson had asked about.

  “Waltin?” said Wiklander, sounding surprised. “That dandy who drowned on Mallorca a while back?”

  “That’s the one,” said Johansson. “He quit us a few years after Palme and then he drowned during some vacation in Spain a few years later.”

  “Sure, I can do that,” said Wiklander with surprise. “Do you think he has anything to do with this, Boss?”

  “Not in the slightest,” said Johansson emphatically. “Why should he?” Just a little private question I have, thought Johansson, and why I’m asking has nothing to do with you.

  “Sure,” said Wiklander. “I’ll take care of it.” I wonder what this is really about, he thought.

  32

  Sunday, April 2, 2000

  At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, Holt called her boss Lars Martin Johansson at home to obtain permission to proceed with Helena Stein via the methods she had learned during her more than ten years as a detective—shadowing, wiretapping, and the whole ballet, so something would finally happen. Others could sit and peck at a computer or bury their heads in a pile of binders, like her colleague Lisa Mattei, for example, who loved that sort of thing and was better at it than almost anyone else.

  In contrast to the morning before, Johansson didn’t answer until the third ring, and he was if anything even more direct than the first time Holt had called him at home that weekend.

  “Good morning, Holt,” Johansson muttered. “How can I help you?”

  “I’d like to initiate external surveillance of Stein,” said Holt. I don’t want him to get the idea that I’ve become fond of him, she thought. Calling two mornings in a row is perhaps a bit too much?

  “Forget it,” said Johansson politely. “Call me again when you’ve placed her in Eriksson’s apartment. Give me three good reasons, and then I promise to think about it.”

  So a wiretap is out of the question, thought Holt.

  “And you can also forget about tapping her telephone,” said Johansson, who despite his nonexistent social skills was apparently a mind reader.

  “Then I’ll have to say thank you, Boss,” Holt said politely, “and I do hope I haven’t disturbed you on a Sunday morning.” And how would I manage without you and people like you? she thought sourly.

  “Forget about that too,” said Johansson. “And a piece of advice: Someone like me doesn’t bite on something like that,” and he hung up.

  Oh my, thought Holt. But there isn’t much time.

  Martinez too had gotten stuck in the bureaucratic mud. All the technicians who were on duty at SePo’s tech squad were fully occupied with a matter that had suddenly come up, top priority and so secret that they wouldn’t even say when they might be returning to the building on Polhemsgatan.

  It wasn’t possible to get hold of on-duty technicians at the police department in Stockholm, though in a way it was simpler with them because no one was even there to answer the phone, much less anyone else who could tell her anything at all.

  “Don’t ask me, they’re probably out running around somewhere, as usual,” said an irritated chief inspector at the City squad’s detective unit when Martinez finally got hold of him.

  “Thanks for your help,” Martinez said politely, putting down the receiver. Idiot, she thought.

  Both Holt and Martinez had to resign themselves to their fate—keeping Mattei company in front of the computers and piles of binders that were neatly arranged in the project room they’d moved into in order to be left alone with their mission. Mattei was happy as a clam and promised to show them some interesting new software after lunch—“Assuming you’re interested of course,” she added. Holt decided to make the best of her circumstances and, for lack of anything better to do, refresh her knowledge of the Eriksson case. What Martinez was actually up to at her computer was less clear, but she mostly seemed to be surfing on the secret police’s own network and taking full advantage of her temporarily expanded access.

  Johansson had devoted the day to his wife, Pia, or Peppy Pia as he called her at home when he was in the mood.

  The first time he had met her was almost fifteen years ago. He had run into her when he was investigating a mysterious suicide he had been dragged into, an American journalist who supposedly took his own life by jumping out of a sixteenth-floor window. The reason he had started to pay attention to Pia was more private than professional.

  He had spoken with her as one of several witnesses, and because she looked the way she did and was the person she was, he immediately became interested in her, considerably more interested than he normally would have been. This was highly unfortunate given the way he had met her. On that point Johansson was very old-fashioned. Women he met in connection with his job, even in a situation like this, which was somewhere in between personal and professional, he did not meet as a man but rather as a police officer.

  When he had finally put the case of the dead journalist behind him, not suicide but murder, he looked Pia up again, not as a police officer but as a man. But at the time she’d had something else going on, and what that was he never asked, because he knew anyway. He had hidden Pia far back in his mind among all the other things that certainly could have been significant in his life but for various reasons never were because he had never made up his mind. He had thought about her sometimes when the solitude that he all too gladly resorted to became too tangible. Then he thought about her with a special sense of loss that did not feed on all that had happened but only on the things that hadn’t but perhaps might have.

  Several years later, when he had basically stopped thinking about her, he accidentally ran into her in his own grocery store, in the neighborhood where he lived. Luck of the draw, thought Johansson happily, and despite his estimable talents as a detective, for once he had no idea how things really stood.

  Less than a month earlier Pia, who often thought about Lars Martin Johansson for more or less the same reasons he thought about her, happened to read a lengthy interview with Johansson in a tabloid, and immediately decided that if anything was going to happen in that area of her life, she was probably the one who would have to take the initiative. It was just a sudden impulse that she followed because over the years she had caught herself thinking about a man she had met only twice in her life. She found out just as quickly where he lived and that, at least in a legal sense, he was as single as could be. After that she figured out where he probably did his grocery shopping, and because she too lived on Söder it wasn’t difficult for her to change to a different store. On the fifth visit, just when she was thinking the whole project was starting to seem a little ridiculous, she had run into an absent-minded Johansson standing in deep contemplation in front of the meat counter. And that’s the way it was.

  “What are we doing today?” asked a pleased Johansson as he squeezed grapefruit and oranges for his still half-asleep wife. “What do you think about starting the day with a long walk? The weather is almost as good as yesterday,” he added.

  “What do you think about coming back to bed?” Pia proposed. “Then we can think about it while we’re considering something else.”

  “Yes,” said Johansson. “Do you want juice now or do you want to wait?” Not a bad idea actually, he thought, and they could always go for a walk later.

  “Later,” said Pia, suddenly looking very attentive.

  “Good,” said Johansson, reaching out his hand for her slender neck.

  After ordering out sushi for the second day in a row, Holt, Martinez, and Mattei devoted the afternoon to their daily war council.

  “I’m starting to put together quite a bit on Stein now,” said Mattei, pointing to an impressive pile of computer printouts and other papers. “I almost feel she and I are getting to know each other in some way. This is really exciting.”

  “You’ve never thought about writing a novel?” asked Martinez innocently.

  “Sure,” said Mattei, nodding thoughtfully. “This is a problem I have when I do this kind of job. I have to do
wnplay the literary element of my work. I don’t know how to explain it, but to me it’s often been the case that a really good novel has more to say about what we’re really like as human beings than the gloomy accounts of people and their lives that we compile here.”

  “I’m sure Stein would be delighted to know how much you want to cuddle up with her,” said Martinez, smiling wryly. “If she only knew … imagine how happy she would be. Perhaps you should—”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Holt interrupted, nodding seriously at Mattei. “There are some truths about other people that we can only discover by means of our imagination. The problem is this place where we work, because they don’t much like that sort of thing here; in fact they’re actually scared to death of it.” Prejudices on the other hand, she thought. They’re always nice and safe.

  “You must be a fortunate person, Linda,” said Holt for some reason, and then they returned to their respective piles of papers, and it was not until it was time to go home that a friendly male colleague called from the tech squad and said that he was now back in the building and was of course at their immediate disposal.

  Martinez got up at once, took her beer can and her basis for comparison, and vanished in the direction of the tech squad. Half an hour later she was back, and when Holt saw her come through the doorway to the room where they were sitting she did not even need to ask how the work had gone.