Another Time, Another Life

by Leif G. W. Persson

  Now I understand what Jarnebring and everyone else here was talking about, thought Holt, who had finally experienced the true Lars Martin Johansson. Although naturally she didn’t say that.

  “I’m in complete agreement,” said Holt. “That must have been what happened.” At least in the essentials, she thought.

  “And that woman is going to get off … It’s just too much,” said Martinez with poorly controlled anger and her police instincts still intact.

  “Yes,” said Wiklander with a heat he seldom showed and the ambivalence that naturally ensues when reality is no longer black or white. “This is an extraordinarily gloomy story.”

  “It’s probably the sorriest story I’ve heard,” said Mattei, who looked like she might start crying.

  And for some reason it was to her that Johansson turned when he began to speak again.

  “Yes, of course it is,” said Johansson. “Sometimes it’s a real shame about us humans. And this time it’s a real shame about Helena Stein. Speaking of her,” Johansson continued, smiling at Mattei, “I understand that you, Lisa, have produced quite a bit about Stein. It would be interesting if you’d give us a summary.” But not a novel, thought Johansson, for he tried to avoid that sort of thing.

  “I could write a whole novel about Helena Stein actually, but for now I’ll concentrate on two moments in her life: the mid-seventies when the occupation of the West German embassy took place, and the late eighties, when Kjell Göran Eriksson was murdered.”

  Sounds good, thought Johansson, but be very careful not to put it in book form and publish it or I will personally see to it that you end up in the slammer.

  “Looks like you’ve uncovered a lot of information about her,” said Johansson.

  “There’s plenty if you know where to look,” said Mattei, who had a hard time concealing her enthusiasm. “Not least on her political involvement, despite the fact that she seems to have made an effort to keep a low public profile the whole time. For example, I have hundreds of pictures of her published in various books and newspapers, which I’ve gathered from open sources. The first one is a book cover that came out in 1975, but the book isn’t at all about her. She’s not even mentioned by name, which in itself isn’t so strange considering her age. The book is called The New Left and was published in 1975 by Fischer & Co., and there’s Helena Stein on the cover. It’s a news photo the publisher used from a demonstration outside the American embassy in 1973, and Stein is only fifteen years old at the time. She’s standing in front of the barricades waving a placard, dressed in jeans and one of those padded jackets girls wore back then. The last photo I have is the official portrait taken of her when she was appointed undersecretary a few years ago. There she’s dressed in a graphite-colored dress with a dark blue blouse and black pumps. She is extremely attractive. So there are twenty-five years between the first and the last picture, and it gets really amazing when you look at all the pictures of her in chronological order—I’ve put them on a separate CD-ROM in case you want to do that yourselves,” said Mattei with enthusiasm blossoming on her pale cheeks.

  “Do you have any more like that?” said Johansson, who himself was passionate about this kind of research. During his most active period as a police officer he used to devote hours to going through photo albums, home videos, and diaries he’d acquired from both crime victims and thugs.

  “I have a whole CD filled with film clips of her too. There are news reports and interviews that I downloaded from our various TV channels. Then I have a third disk with the written material and my summary of her biography.”

  The weekend is saved, thought Johansson, who was already mentally rubbing his hands.

  “The mid-seventies and late eighties,” he reminded her. “What were things like for her then?”

  In the fall of 1975 Helena Stein turned seventeen. Just over six months later she would graduate from the French School, which was one year earlier than normal because when she was little she had been an unusually precocious child and had started school a year before her classmates. But as a teenager she seemed completely normal and displayed a sampling of the usual problems of puberty and conflicts with her parents and teachers.

  Her father was a pediatrician with his own private practice; her mother was an art historian and worked for the Nordic Museum. Helena had grown up in Östermalm and the French School was the only school she attended. She was an only child, and when she was seven her parents divorced and had other children with their new partners. Gradually she acquired four half siblings. At the time of the divorce Helena chose to remain at home with her father.

  In the fall of 1974 her father was appointed as an expert at UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. He temporarily turned his practice over to a colleague, took his new wife and Helena’s two younger half-siblings and moved to New York where they remained for over a year. Helena remained at home in the apartment on Riddargatan, and the contact she had with her mother seemed not to have intensified as a result of her father’s absence. Helena seems to have taken care of herself.

  That same autumn she started a relationship with her cousin Theo Tischler’s best friend, Sten Welander. Helena had just turned sixteen; Welander was twenty-seven, the father of two and still married to his first wife. When he finally divorced her in the fall of 1975, he had also broken up with Helena Stein.

  Helena Stein seemed to have devoted most of her time during these years to political activism, which led to recurring conflicts with her mother and some of her teachers.

  As a young radical Helena initially hopped among various minor leftwing groups until she finally settled on the Swedish Communist Party. Helena Stein was a young Communist and no one in her bourgeois milieu was particularly happy about that, but it was hoped that this phase would soon pass, and that by and by it would be seen as a youthful aberration in the spirit of the time.

  In addition she was involved in a number of other radical groups and societies, the Swedish NLF movement of course but also KRUM, which worked for humane treatment of criminals.

  “That’s the recurring theme in her life,” Mattei summarized, “her strong political involvement, always to the left.”

  “Yeah,” said Johansson with a drawl. “Judging by her upbringing, she sounds like a typical young radical from the happy seventies.”

  “No,” said Mattei, shaking her head. “There you’re wrong, Boss. That’s actually a prejudice.”

  “I see,” said Johansson, not looking as though he was particularly offended. “How so?”

  “It wasn’t the case that the young left of the time was dominated by a few upper-class kids. Those involved were a rather representative selection of the populace,” said Mattei.

  “So Stein was an exception,” said Johansson.

  “Yes. Her background was unusual within the young left,” said Mattei.

  “Her involvement then,” said Johansson, “how genuine was it?” Given her background, thought Johansson.

  “I’m completely convinced that her political involvement was genuine,” said Mattei. “Otherwise she never would have thrown herself into it the way she did.”

  “You mean the West German embassy,” said Johansson. “Don’t you think that was mostly a desire for adventure? Exciting and romantic, or so she believed. Not at all like what it turned out to be.”

  “It’s possible that was part of it,” said Mattei, “but there were other things that might not have been so pleasant for her.”

  “Such as?” asked Johansson.

  “If I’ve gotten this right, she was pretty badly bullied during her whole time at high school, and the first year she studied law at Uppsala a couple of her male classmates gave her a good beating after a party at the Stockholm student organization,” Mattei said in a serious tone. “According to the police report it was a political discussion that went downhill. If you’re interested in counting her bruises, I’ve placed a copy of the medical examination from Academic Hospital in her background materia
l,” Mattei said.

  You’re a lot pluckier than you look, thought Johansson.

  “What bastards,” he said. “But after that, where was she in 1989 at the time that she helped Eriksson take down the flag?”

  “She was a member of the Social Democratic Party. She became a member as early as 1977, and she still is, as you know. She’s also a member of their women’s caucus and their attorneys group. Belongs to the left wing of the party. Despite her low profile, she is viewed as a very big name.”

  “That’s what you see,” said Johansson contentedly, because even he suffered from the unfortunately common weakness of gladly judging others by comparison with himself.

  “Excuse me, Boss,” said Mattei amiably. “See what?”

  “You see a person who has moved to the right,” said Johansson.

  “I guess everyone does when they get older. There are lots of academic dissertations in which that political shift has been analyzed.”

  “Nice to hear,” said Johansson. Nice to hear that people are normal, he thought.

  “She hasn’t been on the gravy train since she became a Social Democrat in any event,” said Mattei.

  “She hasn’t,” said Johansson. Has she had any more beatings, he wondered, but he couldn’t ask that of course. That would be childish.

  “She has worked very actively in politics and has a number of responsibilities besides her job as undersecretary,” Mattei continued. “She even served in parliament for a short time in the early nineties, substituting for someone who was sick.”

  “But in November 1989 she was working as an attorney?” Johansson asked.

  “She got her law degree at Uppsala in 1979, did her internship at the district court, and practiced at a law firm up until 1985, when she became an attorney. She quit in 1991, and since then she has worked more or less full-time in politics and in the government offices since the Social Democrats came back to power in 1994. She’s actually somewhat unusual for a Social Democrat,” said Mattei.

  “In what regard?” Johansson asked.

  “Well, partly because of her background,” said Mattei. “I guess it’s just like you say, Boss. Helena Stein is an upper-middle-class girl—and I’m sure she’s had to hear plenty about that too. But there are other things.”

  “Such as?” said Johansson.

  “That she’s viewed as an extraordinarily capable attorney, that she speaks several languages fluently, that it seems to be extremely difficult to find anyone who has worked with her who has anything but good to say about her—”

  “Is she married? Does she have children?” Johansson interrupted.

  “She was married to a classmate for a few years when she was studying in Uppsala and served at the district court. They divorced in 1981. She has no children. She’s had a few relationships of varying duration over the years, but since she was appointed as undersecretary she seems to have lived alone.”

  “Are you quite sure of that?” Johansson asked, and for some reason he was smiling broadly.

  “Yes,” said Mattei. “In recent years she has lived alone.”

  “Interesting,” said Johansson. “I look forward to going through everything you have compiled once I have some peace and quiet. Is there anything else in particular you think I should look at?”

  “That she was appointed as undersecretary in the Ministry of Defense is undeniably interesting,” said Mattei.

  “What do you mean?” asked Johansson.

  “She’s had a number of opinions over the years about both the military in general and our export of war matériel in particular,” said Mattei. “Not least when she was working in foreign trade. I don’t think the military and the defense lobbyists were particularly happy about her appointment.”

  “You don’t say,” said Johansson, suddenly looking as if he was thinking deeply. “A new Maj Britt Theorin perhaps?”

  “In an ideological sense I believe that describes her rather well,” said Mattei, “but what her opponents are probably most afraid of is her capacity as an attorney. She seems to be enormously sharp.”

  “But nonetheless she becomes undersecretary in the Ministry of Defense,” said Johansson.

  “Exactly,” said Mattei, “and the only reasonable interpretation is that the government, or the person or persons in the government who decide this sort of thing, wanted to give the military establishment a tweak on the nose.”

  “You don’t say,” said Johansson. I understand what you mean, he thought.

  When the meeting was finished, after the usual questions and the usual empty chatter, Johansson wished everyone a pleasant weekend and thanked them for a job well done.

  “Go rest up properly, and we’ll meet on Monday to try to make some kind of decision about what we should do,” said Johansson, looking both friendly and bosslike.

  Then he took Holt to one side and asked her to compile the essentials and make sure the prosecutor got it all as quickly as possible, no later than the following day.

  “Then you can celebrate the weekend too,” said Johansson. “By the way, don’t you have a little boy?”

  “Not so little,” said Holt, shrugging her shoulders. “He’s turning seventeen soon.”

  “And I’m sure he hates me,” said Johansson, “because I’ve taken his mom away from him.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Holt. “If he knew why I haven’t been at home lately you’d probably be his hero.”

  “You don’t say,” said Johansson, who just happened to think that it was high time to call his own boy, despite the fact that nowadays the good-for-nothing had a fiancée and a child on the way. “But you must have some guy you have to see,” Johansson continued, having decided to engage in a little personnel care and cultivate his human relations. Since he didn’t have anything better to do.

  “No,” said Holt, smiling weakly. “Just like Helena Stein, I’ve been living alone for a while.”

  “Go out and get someone then,” said Johansson unsentimentally. “That shouldn’t be so damned hard.”

  That evening Bo Jarnebring and his wife had come over to Johansson’s place for dinner. It had been just as pleasant as always, and when their guests had gone his wife had fallen asleep almost immediately with her head on his right arm and his left arm around her body.

  Wonder how it’s going for Holt, thought Johansson. Did she sneak out to the pub and hook up with a guy? And then he too had fallen asleep.

  38

  Monday, April 10, 2000

  Johansson devoted the weekend to various activities. Part of the time he spent with his wife. He also went through Mattei’s comprehensive material on undersecretary Helena Stein, and when he was done he was in complete agreement with Mattei. If she ever failed to write a novel she couldn’t blame lack of research material at any rate.

  On the subject of the imagination, thought Johansson, it’s probably only when that takes over that even a reasonably good story takes off and the people in it really come to life. What was true and what was false was actually a rather overvalued distinction. Wasn’t it the case that the really great truths, the eternal truths, could only be given life and substance by means of the human imagination?

  Johansson felt so uplifted by these and similar musings that he decided to reward himself with yet another glass of red wine before going to bed. That evening his wife had gone to see her best girlfriend, and as she was leaving she’d let him know it would probably be a late night and he didn’t need to sit up waiting for her.

  On Monday morning Johansson was still in a good mood, which was excellent because he would be meeting with his department’s chief prosecutor first thing, and he would need all the strength he could summon.

  “What do you think?” said Johansson, nodding at the chief prosecutor, who was already squirming in his chair on the other side of Johansson’s large desk.

  “There are undeniably a number of unpleasant coincidences,” said the chief prosecutor, who did not appear particularly cheerful.


  “There sure are,” said Johansson heartily. As so often happens when against your better judgment you try to make the best of chance, he thought.

  “There is no way this constitutes reasonable grounds for suspicion,” said the chief prosecutor deprecatingly, holding up both palms. “Far from it, far from it. I’ve tried to do an ordinary, traditional sifting of evidence, and when I consider the various aspects—both separately and combined—the only reasonable conclusion is that they’re insufficient … clearly insufficient.”

  “That’s more or less the same conclusion we’ve drawn,” Johansson agreed.

  “That’s probably the only reasonable conclusion you can come to,” said the prosecutor, “and we can’t disregard the fact that there are credible alternative explanations for what might have happened when Eriksson was eliminated. In which there is not the slightest room for any involvement on Stein’s part, I might add.”

  “So what are you thinking?” asked Johansson innocently, despite the fact that he had already figured out what the response would be.

  “Well,” said the chief prosecutor, “I’m thinking for example of the interview with Chief Inspector Bäckström. He does have a completely different view of the matter, and he was after all responsible for the original investigation.”

  “He certainly was,” said Johansson.

  “Bäckström is a very experienced, skilled police officer,” said the prosecutor. “One of the real old owls,” he said, nodding with more emphasis than even Johansson would have expected of him.

  “A real old owl,” said Johansson heartily. A really thirsty old owl, he thought. “That homosexual lead is definitely promising,” he continued. Assuming that you’re really stupid, and you definitely are, he thought.

  “What do you think about a dismissed with prejudice as far as Stein is concerned,” the chief prosecutor said carefully.