Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime

by Leif G. W. Persson

  Waltin shook his head and smiled weakly.

  “Okay,” Eriksson continued. “One of the guys is at the tech college, one’s in business school, one’s studying at GIH, one’s studying political science, one sociology, and one works with information management. All of them are Swedes except for the last, who’s some type of student from South Africa. He’s here on a scholarship this semester, black guy. He’s older than the others, twenty-eight, born in Pretoria. He got his scholarship from the Swedish trade union federation.”

  Typical, thought Waltin. The social democrats and their blacks and Arabs and all those other gooks that they drag here.

  “Do we have anything on any of them?” he asked.

  “Not with us or within the open operation. Yes, if we include the kinds of things that all boys get involved with in their teens. The one at GIH was a little wild when he was in high school, but otherwise, no, just normal Swedish students. None of them are from Stockholm. Country boys.”

  Waltin nodded. A purely idiotic project that an old bastard had palmed off on Berg, he thought. The only question was how to get himself where he wanted to go without wasting time on unnecessary work.

  “Do you have any ideas about how we proceed from here?” he asked.

  “I thought about trying to find out who he is,” said Eriksson. “As I said, that’s going to take time, but I have some possibilities I thought I’d try out.”

  “I have an idea too.” Waltin smiled and nodded.

  “Tell me,” said Eriksson, looking at him with curiosity.

  Waltin smiled secretively and shook his head.

  “Leave his biography to me, then I promise you’ll get a complete description of him at the end of the week. Without cheating.”

  “Without cheating?” She smiled inquisitively and nodded. He actually seems super smart, thought Eriksson.

  “Without cheating,” said Waltin emphatically and held up his right thumb.

  Half as big as mine, he thought when she held out her small thumb, and he felt the well-known arousal when he saw her before him, curled up in the corner of his big sofa with her little thumb in her little mouth while the tears ran down her small, round cheeks.

  As soon as she had gone Waltin went into the office restroom for relief. He leaned her over the washbasin with a firm grip around her thin neck while he took her from behind, hard and determined so that she would be quite clear about that right from the beginning. Then he washed his hands carefully and phoned one of his many business acquaintances who had a company subsidiary in the United States.

  . . .

  Assistant Detective Eriksson drove straight home to her studio apartment out in Solna and changed into university student clothing. Because she had studied criminology part-time for over a year this was easy. After that she took the subway into the city; a short walk brought her to the lobby of the Roseship student dormitory on Körsbärsvägen. She knew precisely what she would do and how she would do it. The camera and the rest she had stuffed under the books in her shoulder bag.

  Waltin also knew what he would do. He had asked his business acquaintance with the American subsidiary to look a little closer at a young American who was trying to sell him on a business idea. Before Waltin went any further he of course wanted to know if the young American could be trusted: “Good ideas, but of course you’d really like to know if he’s fish or fowl.” It was also a bit sensitive, obviously, and as always it was urgent. On the other hand, what it cost was less important as long as it was done thoroughly.

  “You’ve turned to the right man, Claes,” said his acquaintance warmly. “We have contact with a completely phenomenal private detective bureau in New York. I can get them going at once.”

  Wonder how much he’s thinking about charging me this time, thought Waltin. Thanked him cordially for the assistance and ended the conversation.

  Criminology student Jeanette Eriksson rang numerous times at the door to the corridor where Krassner was living before one of the doors was opened from inside. Out came a man in his thirties dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and in stocking feet. He was uncombed and appeared clearly irritated.

  It’s him, she thought, and smiled her little girl smile at him.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m looking for a friend who lives here. Medium height, slender build, dark hair, blue eyes, thin face with a defined jawline and a dimple on his chin.” Really good-looking, she thought routinely.

  Krassner—for it must be he—sighed and appeared tangibly surly.

  “Sorry, I don’t speak Swedish,” he said, and made no sign of letting her in.

  And it was at that moment that Daniel showed up.

  “Maybe I can help you,” he said, smiling broadly with white teeth.

  All guys are the same, thought Jeanette Eriksson half an hour later when she and her new acquaintance, Daniel M’Boye, were sitting across from each other, each with a cup of bad coffee from the dormitory cafeteria. Daniel had been very helpful; the friend she had been looking for had unfortunately been forced to break off his studies when his mother met with a traffic accident.

  “Is he a close friend of yours?” he asked, and the compassion in his eyes seemed completely genuine.

  She had managed her retreat with flying colors: old friend from high school. Didn’t know each other especially well, actually. She had heard that he was studying law and had thought about asking if she could borrow some books from him. But that was no problem at all, she assured him. She had other friends she could ask.

  “Do you want a cup of coffee?” He looked at her, courteous and well-mannered.

  She appeared just hesitant enough.

  “I’d been thinking about going down myself and having a cup in the cafeteria.” The smile was broader now and almost a little imploring.

  “Okay,” said Jeanette, nodding and smiling. This kind of thing is actually just too easy, she thought.

  First, Daniel told about himself and then asked what she did, and she answered completely correctly. Studied criminology, it was going so-so, second year at the university, didn’t really know what she wanted to be, lived in a studio in Solna, also so-so, mostly study and sleep, not so much fun but life would no doubt go on.

  “Although your friend who didn’t want to let me in didn’t exactly seem happy either,” said Jeanette and giggled. “Surly type.”

  “I hardly know him,” said Daniel and smiled. “He’s only been living there a week. He’s an American. Rather mysterious.”

  “I thought he seemed old too,” said Jeanette with the correct smile. “What’s he studying?”

  “He said he’s writing a book. Something political, political science, about Sweden and Swedish politics. It’s not exactly my thing,” M’Boye said, and smiled broadly as he leaned closer to her.

  Time to move, thought Jeanette, and she smiled shyly back. Of course he got her home phone number after the equally obvious evasions. The new secret number that she had already arranged on Friday afternoon and that she hoped she could soon be rid of.

  The weekly meeting with his superiors had gone completely without friction for once. Berg had reported on a few mixed problems: the Yugoslavs, the Kurds, how it was going with the intensified survey of antidemocratic elements within the police and the military.

  “It’s going slowly,” said Berg, “but it’s moving forward.”

  The special adviser had nodded, a very slight but concurring nod.

  After the meeting he had taken Berg aside.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “I hope I’ll have something for you on Friday,” said Berg. “We don’t dare go outside the building, so it’s taking time to find out who he is.”

  “Wise,” said the special adviser, and to Berg’s astonishment he had patted him on the arm.

  He seems worried, thought Berg. Why? he thought. What is it he knows that I don’t know?

  “How’s it going?” Berg asked Waltin, who was sitting on the other side of his de
sk, lightly pinching the already perfect creases of his trousers.

  “It’s going slowly, but forward,” said Waltin. “Do you want to see what he looks like?”

  Waltin handed over a plastic folder with photographs.

  The photos of Krassner were taken with a telephoto as he went in and out of the dormitory where he was living: heavy boots, jeans, thick padded jacket, bareheaded on one occasion and with a stocking cap on another, close-ups of his face, thin, dogged. A person with an idea, thought Berg, who didn’t like what he saw.

  “Do you know anything about his routines?”

  “Seems to mostly sit closed up in his room and type,” said Waltin. “He’s visited the public library, the university library, and the Royal Library. Yesterday evening he went down to the press club and had a few beers. Walked the entire way home afterward. The light wasn’t turned off until around two o’clock.” So little Jeanette will really have to earn her keep, he thought contentedly.

  “Do you have enough people?”

  “Yes,” said Waltin. What is this really about? he thought.

  “Do we have anyone in his vicinity?”

  “Yes,” said Waltin.

  “One of ours?”

  “Yes,” said Waltin.

  “What’s he like then?”

  “Solitary, a little mysterious, seems almost a little worked up. Says hello to his corridor neighbors but doesn’t associate with anyone. Tapes hairs on his door when he goes out. You know, that type.”

  Berg knew exactly.

  “And mostly he sits locked up in his room and writes?”

  “Yes,” said Waltin. “He seems to mostly sit there and peck like a sparrow on his little typewriter.”

  “What does he live on then?” said Berg, who didn’t like what he was hearing. “Birdseed?”

  “McDonald’s hamburgers and the occasional pizza.”

  This doesn’t sound good, thought Berg. This doesn’t sound good at all.

  On Thursday evening Waltin’s contact phoned. He had a little material on Krassner, which he wondered if he should fax over. There was more on the way, but he wouldn’t get that until next week.

  “He seems to be a strange bird,” said Waltin’s contact. “May I be so bold as to ask what kind of business idea he wants to sell you on?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Waltin. “It’s not a big secret. It deals with the media. He had some interesting ideas about how certain media products could be developed.”

  “Oh, I see,” said the contact. “Then I would be damn careful if I were in your shoes.”

  Jonathan Paul Krassner, known as John, was born on July 15, 1953, in Albany, New York, the only child of a marriage between Paul Jürgen Krassner, born in 1910, and Mary Melanie Buchanan, born in 1920. His parents had married the year before he was born, and divorced the year after.

  The father was said to have been a salesman. After the divorce he had moved to Fresno, California. His further fate was unknown and any contacts with his son could in any event not be established. John had grown up with his mother, who worked as a nurse at a Catholic hospital outside Albany. The mother had died of cancer in 1975.

  After American elementary and secondary school, with grades that were well above average, Krassner started at the state university in Albany, where he studied political science, sociology, and journalism, and finished his degree. After that he had worked as an intern at a local newspaper, moved on to a local TV station for just over a year, then returned to the newspaper where he had started his career, but now as an investigative reporter with his own byline. And after a few years he himself had wound up in the newspaper on the basis of a grandly planned series of articles, “From Refugee to Racketeer.” The English has a better bite to it than the Swedish translation, thought Waltin.

  According to the newspaper’s investigative reporter John P. Krassner, an economically successful and socially respected Vietnamese family had built up a local crime syndicate in Albany and its environs behind a façade of restaurants, convenience stores, and coin laundries. The local uproar had been widespread for a time. Police and prosecutors had been interested, but rather quickly shook their heads and suspended their investigations. The Vietnamese family, on the other hand, had not taken the matter so lightly. They had sued the newspaper and its owners for several million dollars for libel, reported all those involved for illegal discrimination, and started to agitate in the state legislature through their local politicians and a national organization for Vietnamese boat people. The newspaper had crept to the cross, made a public apology, and paid significant damages after a settlement. Krassner had been thrown out on his ear.

  What he had done after that was less clear. First he sold the house that he had inherited from his mother and where he lived after her death, to move in with his uncle, his only remaining relative. He enrolled in the university’s evening courses and gradually completed a master’s degree in “investigative journalism.” In addition he supported himself as some type of intellectual jack-of-all-trades with freelance assignments for various media, as a lecturer in courses on journalism, and for a short time as a copywriter at an advertising agency in Poughkeepsie, about sixty miles north of New York and roughly just as far south of Albany.

  Waltin leafed among the faxed papers: the hired detective bureau’s exemplary systematic summary; appended copies of the parents’ wedding certificate and divorce decree; Krassner’s birth certificate; his school grades and class photos from high school; a copy of his driver’s license and his university degree; his mother’s death certificate; and a considerable packet of copies of the offending newspaper articles. At the bottom of the pile Waltin also found an obituary of his uncle and a copy of the uncle’s will, and it was now that this started to be seriously interesting.

  The uncle, John Christopher Buchanan, known as John, was born in 1908 in Newark, New Jersey, and had “peacefully passed away in his home in Albany on Tuesday afternoon, April 16, 1985,” almost exactly six months before Waltin had occasion to be informed of his life and work. After completing secondary school he matriculated at Columbia University and by and by earned a doctorate in political science in 1938. At the time of Pearl Harbor he was working as an instructor in the same subject at Northwestern University, outside of Chicago, but like “the true patriot that he was” he had immediately left the academic world and trained to be a reserve officer.

  After staff service of an unspecified nature in Washington, D.C., he had in the final stages of the Second World War been transferred to Europe with the rank of captain. In the spring of 1947, Lieutenant Colonel Buchanan had been appointed assistant military attaché at the American embassy in Stockholm, where he stayed for more than four years. Then his history got less clear, but in any case in 1958 he left the military as a full colonel and returned to academic life in the form of a professorship in contemporary European history at the State University of New York in Albany. The same year as his twelve-years-younger sister died of cancer, 1975—probably no connection—he had retired “in order to enjoy, by virtue of his age and after an honorable life in the service of his country, his well-earned leisure.”

  Wonder if he drank, thought Waltin. Otherwise he ought to have done something more.

  The most interesting thing was his will. After the introductory and obligatory enumeration of the possessions he had left behind—the house where he lived, various liquid assets in bank accounts and pension funds, his library, a collection of “European military collectibles from the Second World War,” furniture, art, and other personal property—John C. Buchanan had willed “all of the collected property left by me, the material as well as the intellectual, to my nearest relation, dear friend, and faithful squire, John P. Krassner.”

  The material assets had been easy to account for. According to the court proceedings, these amounted to $129,850.50, after deductions for funeral expenses. Not one word about what the intellectual property left behind consisted of.

  “But this is jus
t fantastic,” said Assistant Detective Eriksson, and she smiled with both her mouth and her eyes at her well-dressed boss. “How did you do it?” He must be supersmart, she thought.

  Waltin smiled modestly and made a slight, dismissive shrug.

  “We can take that up on a later occasion,” he said. “I thought that you could turn in copies of everything plus your own information to Berg.”

  Cool, thought Eriksson. That really can’t hurt in this place.

  Berg didn’t seem equally enthused.

  “ ‘All of the collected property left by me, the material as well as the intellectual …’ The intellectual? What does he mean by that?”

  “The papers he left behind, his notes, his diaries, old photo albums from his active period. What do I know?” Waltin turned up his hands. Not everyone’s like you, Erik, he thought.

  Berg shook his head and dragged his hand along his chin.

  “This doesn’t sound very plausible. It’s standard procedure for the responsible authority to see to such things when someone leaves. That would be violating the whole basic principle for this operation.”

  Sure, and the stork is the father of all children, thought Waltin.

  “Okay,” said Berg. “We have to find out what this character is actually up to.”

  “Intellectual inheritance,” said the special adviser, looking at Berg with his customary wry smile. “What does he mean by that?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” said Berg. “I really don’t believe he’s shown up here to gather material on his uncle’s time with the embassy in Stockholm.”

  “I’ve read Krassner’s so-called investigative reporting,” said the special adviser. “The content and intellectual substance, not to mention the language, instill me with a more than slight sense of unease. Not least considering the fact that Buchanan was his uncle.”

  “We’re going to find out what he’s up to,” said Berg with emphasis.