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

by Leif G. W. Persson

  Six months later Operation Olga had been concluded, and at that point for the most part everything about the person who was being investigated was known, up to when he’d finished military service. After that almost nothing was known other than that “with a certainty bordering on likelihood” he had robbed a bank in northern Germany six months earlier and clearly had a fairly close connection to a Swedish group on the extreme left wing with the Palestinian question topmost on its order of business. But it was as if he himself had been swallowed up off the face of the earth. Until two months ago, when he, with the same appearance despite all the years that had passed, tanned and in seemingly perfect physical condition, had shown up in a picture taken by a rather craftily placed surveillance camera at the little park outside the government building, Rosenbad.

  Operation Olga had immediately been brought up from the archives, assigned a new project number and a new budget. Berg had elevated the guard level for Rosenbad and the key persons who worked there and had informed the person responsible for security at the government office. He had also had a conversation with the prime minister’s special adviser, who had been markedly uninterested in the matter itself but as usual generous with both sarcastic remarks and expressions of doubt.

  “I don’t believe in such characters,” he stated behind his heavy, lowered eyelids. “As soon as they’ve acquired a face they’re almost always uninteresting. I don’t believe in your connection either,” he continued. “It’s probably as simple as the fact that you’ve confused him with another or several others, and it wouldn’t be the first time in that case, would it? And if you haven’t done so, we can be thankful for the fact that he went to the right meeting.”

  “Right meeting?” said Berg. “I don’t really understand what you mean.”

  “Don’t worry,” said the special adviser with his usual wry half-sneer, for this was before Krassner had come into the picture and forced them to approach one another. “It’s not that I’m trying to convert you to the Palestinian cause. What I mean is only that if he’d gone to a political meeting of the sort to which his type is expected to go, there would scarcely have been people from your group who could’ve caught sight of him.”

  So that’s what you say, thought Berg sourly, but because this was before Krassner had brought them closer to each other he had kept his thoughts to himself.

  A former paratrooper who had been observed on three brief occasions over a period of ten years and had otherwise disappeared without a trace. The other person who was of particular concern to Berg was the owner of a nursery outside Finspång in the province of Östergötland. It was the government office’s own security department that had reported him to Berg, and normally he would only have become one more case in the large pile of such cases that they were content to simply register.

  A little more than a year earlier the man had written to the prime minister personally and asked for his help. After a divorce his ex-wife had gotten full custody of the couple’s then six-year-old son. In spite of the fact that she was a whore, in spite of the fact that her new husband was both an alcoholic and a criminal, and in spite of the fact that he loved his son more than anything else in the world. Could the prime minister intervene and put things right? Obviously he could not. The nursery owner had received the usual friendly letter of refusal from the female adviser in the prime minister’s office who took care of such matters and could rattle off the legal arguments in her sleep. Then he’d written again and received the same reply as the previous time. In his third letter he had sharpened his tone, become personal, unpleasant, even threatening. Then he’d started phoning, and about the same time as he landed on Berg’s desk he’d ceased making contact. From sheer momentum, however, the matter had gone on to the secret police’s office in Norrköping, where they either had little to do or money left in their account. The gardener was both a marksman and a hunter and had a license for eight weapons in total: a revolver, two pistols, three rifles, and two shotguns. Fourteen days after a surveillance file had been set up on him with the secret police in Norrköping he had shown up at a political meeting in Åtvidaberg where the prime minister was the main speaker.

  When the meeting was over he had sneaked around in the parking lot outside, and when the prime minister and his guards drove away to have dinner at the Freemasons Hotel in Linköping he’d followed them in his car. He had parked a distance away from the hotel, walked back and forth on the street outside, and after awhile went into the hotel lobby. At that point he was already surrounded by a hastily doubled surveillance group of, in total, four plainclothes detectives from the secret police in Norrköping.

  “Do we know if he’s armed?” asked the group leader on the radio.

  “Answer don’t know,” said one of the detectives who was best situated to see the object at the same time as he himself moved his service weapon from its shoulder holster to his right coat pocket.

  “Okay,” said the group leader. “If he moves even one yard in the direction of the banquet room we’ll go in and take him.”

  But he hadn’t. Instead he had quickly gone out onto the street again, gotten into his car and driven back to the house where he lived. The following day, after the leadership team meeting, he’d received the code name Immortelle.

  As a surveillance matter, Immortelle had developed in a promising manner, but as a human being he appeared to be steadily feeling worse. It seemed as if he’d suddenly given up hope of getting his son back. He hadn’t even tried to contact him. He’d let go the employees he’d had previously, and the business he was running had been put on the back burner. His contacts with the outside world, by telephone and other means, had been drastically reduced. He isolated himself from other people. Instead he started cultivating certain of his earlier interests and acquired at least one that was completely new and at odds with his history. He could spend hours at the shooting range, where he put shot after shot into a torso target at a distance of three hundred yards with the aid of his hunting rifle and a newly purchased high-powered telescopic sight. When he’d started he was a good shot. Now he was at the same level as the police department’s own sharpshooters.

  Early in the morning he disappeared out into the terrain dressed in running shoes and jogging clothes. A few months earlier he had needed more than a quarter of an hour to make his way around the cross-country track where he worked out. Nowadays he ran his two miles in less than nine minutes. In the evenings he lifted weights. He had taken a weightlifting bench, barbells, and weights to one of his greenhouses and his nightly training sessions usually lasted for two hours most days of the week. He was strong, he was fast, he could shoot, and taken all together this was not good at all.

  On top of all that he had joined the Social Democratic Party. Scarcely from conviction, for there was nothing in his background that pointed in that direction. From the careful markings that he made with a pencil in the party newspaper, the local chapter’s member newsletter, and various mailings that had been rescued from his garbage can, he seemed most interested in where the prime minister was to be found, in a purely physical sense, in the immediate future. He had a motive, and he was also in possession of the means. Now he was just searching for a suitable occasion, and there was touching agreement about all this not only among the secret police in Norrköping but also among their superiors up in Stockholm.

  Berg’s account had made an impression on his listeners. The minister of justice had been almost shocked. “Yes, I’m a little shocked when I hear this sort of thing,” he concluded. “You’d rather not think about the fact that such people exist.”

  After that he got caught up in an extensive exposition of how things had been during the old king’s time. Back when he was only a young boy who went with his father to Palmgren’s Leather behind the Royal Theater to fetch Papa’s new riding boots, when the king suddenly came in, nodding amiably at everyone in the store.

  “He walked around all alone, yes, not counting his aide-de-camp, but tha
t was mostly so he could avoid paying himself, I guess. He walked around all alone in the middle of Stockholm and no one would have dreamed of even saying something rude to him.” The minister shook his head mournfully.

  Even the chief legal officer had spoken up. When Berg—without naming names—had given a short description of the provincial count, the chief legal officer had suddenly opened his mouth for the first time outside his judicial preserve. He himself was an aristocrat on both his father’s and mother’s side of the family.

  “He is regrettably a relative of mine,” the chief legal officer stated dryly. “By marriage, of course,” he added quickly when he saw the special adviser’s pleased smile.

  The special adviser had said exactly what Berg had expected he would not say.

  “How many people would you need to be able to carry out a complete surveillance of these characters?”

  “Complete surveillance?” asked Berg in order to make clear to himself that the person who had posed the question also understood its import.

  “Full surveillance. I’m talking about twenty-two surveillance teams.” The special adviser nodded.

  “We can just forget that,” said Berg. “I don’t have that many people. Besides, they have a number of other things to do, as you gentlemen are certainly aware.” Why is he asking that? thought Berg. He surely must know to the penny how many resources we have, and he can count too.

  The special adviser had been content to nod.

  “One more thing,” he said. “How many others are there that you are aware of? Besides this especially qualified group that you’ve reported on?”

  “Hundreds,” said Berg. “Certainly hundreds.” He’s not asking on his own account, thought Berg. He wants me to say it to the others. Why does he want that? he thought.

  Then he recounted the information that the head of his bodyguard unit had compiled and he took the field with flying colors and fluttering banners.

  “I’ve had a compilation done,” said Berg. “Of the guarding of the prime minister during the last thirty days before this meeting.”

  . . .

  The prime minister had been traveling inside and outside the country during seventeen of those thirty days, and if the decision had been up to Berg, he could just as well have been gone the entire time, for then he was always guarded by his own regular group of bodyguards, often augmented by reinforcements from the operations bureau as well as substantial resources from the local police. Best of all was when he was abroad, for there they had completely different experiences and the security forces were as a rule enormous compared to what Berg had to work with. It was worst when he was at home, at work, or in his own residence.

  “During eleven of these thirteen days he hasn’t had any physical protection during the night, other than the guard from the security company that we’ve placed outside his entryway. On every one of these days he has on one or several occasions been alone outside Rosenbad or his residence. Altogether this amounts to more than twenty occasions, as it appears, everything from a quarter of an hour to several hours. He has walked away from and back to his residence; he has been out having dinner or in town shopping. That’s the situation,” said Berg, nodding with all the seriousness that the situation demanded.

  “Naughty, naughty, Berg,” said the special adviser, chuckling with delight.

  “I have not, repeat not, had him followed,” said Berg. “This is information that I have put together in other ways, and there is only one reason that I have done so. The prime minister is an object of protection for which I and my people are responsible and, moreover, one of our six highest priority objects. You are aware of the background that I have reported on and the rest you can certainly figure out for yourselves.”

  “I’ll talk with him,” said the special adviser, and he sounded neither ironic, uninterested, nor even weary. “But you should probably not expect too much. He is who he is—and then, he is my chief,” he added by way of explanation.

  “I’ll talk with him too,” said the minister of justice. “I really will.”

  “You can of course explain to him that it’s not like it was in the old king’s time,” said the special adviser behind his lowered eyelids, and when he said that he sounded exactly as usual again.

  . . .

  For the past fourteen days Waltin had been planning a break-in. The first time he’d done a break-in he was only fifteen years old and still in junior high school. And he hadn’t intended to steal anything that time either. He just wanted to look around a little. He’d made his way into the apartment of a schoolmate who’d gone away with his family during midwinter break. It hadn’t been especially difficult. He’d gotten hold of keys long before and he’d visited his schoolmate at home on several occasions so that he was well oriented in the family residence. Actually it was his mother that Waltin was interested in. A small, slender, beautiful woman with a lot of class and not the least like her piggish son.

  It had been a marvelous experience. He’d walked around for hours in the large, silent, dark apartment. He’d had surgical gloves on, a little practical pen-like flashlight that he’d bought at the hobby store, and he’d had a hard-on almost the entire time. He had proceeded systematically without leaving any traces. In a photo album in the parents’ bedroom he’d finally found what he’d been searching for. It was a photo of his friend’s mother. Without a stitch on her body she stood, smiling in the most shameless way toward the photographer, and judging by the background this was out at their summer place in the archipelago, for he’d been there too. At the same time it had been a great disappointment. She was holding his classmate, who already looked like a little pig ten years ago, by the hand, and besides she had much larger breasts than he’d thought. At least at that time.

  At first he had nonetheless considered taking the photo with him, trying to cut away the little pig and making a copy of the remainder which he could send to her anonymously with a few well-formulated lines hinting that there was more, and worse, and that perhaps they ought to meet … but those breasts were much too repugnant in their fat, white tangibility, so her photo had remained in the album and while he masturbated he tried to cover the little pig and the breasts with the fingers of his left hand. It had gone rather well, even if it had taken a while, and when he was done he had vigorously rubbed sperm over both pig and breasts.

  When he left he had taken along a few pieces of gold jewelry and a few bottles of very good French wine. He had pawned the gold jewelry bit by bit and been paid handsomely. He had enjoyed the wine alone in the seclusion of his room while dear Mama, as usual, lay dying in the next room. Everything also indicated that he had conducted himself creditably. It didn’t even seem as if they had discovered that they had had a secret visit. The pig had been exactly like he always was, equally sniveling and pushy, and if he’d had a break-in at home the whole school would surely have known about it before lunch break.

  That was then. Nowadays he was only occupied with legal break-ins, and his professional capacity had never been questioned among the taciturn few who had the honor of helping him with the practical details. Although this time it didn’t feel right. For one thing he wasn’t especially motivated. What could someone like Krassner actually produce if scrutinized? If it had been a question of ordinary bet-making he wouldn’t have put a dime on the fool. It was not a simple task, either. Entry codes, alarms, detectors, and surveillance cameras were one thing—they could be as sophisticated as anything, for that just it made more fun—but seven watchful youths living squeezed together in a shoe box was something quite different and seven times worse.

  A necessary condition was that he get them out so that the place was empty. Little Jeanette would take care of the South African, even if Waltin didn’t like the fact that he hadn’t come up with a better solution. It also appeared as if he would be rid of the five remaining students. Two would be going home to their parents and a third to his girlfriend. Two had intended to stay home and at least meditate a
little before possibly going out, but because Jeanette had managed to arrange the pop-concert tickets, he would be rid of them too. Probably would be, and that just left his greatest concern, Krassner himself.

  It was only right and appropriate that that old duffer Forselius get to help out with this matter. It was, after all, his fantasies that were the basis of the whole thing. But naturally he had dug in his heels like a restive mule when Waltin had called on him to talk about the matter.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” he said sourly when Waltin explained what it involved. “I hear what you’re saying.”

  “You’re the only one I can trust,” said Waltin. “True, he has contacts with some journalists, but I don’t want to take that risk. I’d rather let it be.”

  “That’s nice to hear,” said Forselius, sounding a trifle more energetic. “That rabble should just be mowed down.”

  Certainly, thought Waltin. Fine with me, but what do we do instead?

  “Couldn’t you invite him here and relate a few war memories about you and his uncle?” Waltin suggested.

  “To someone like that?” snorted the old man. “You don’t think it’s bad enough the way it is?”

  What is it now? thought Waltin, who didn’t have any idea what this was actually about.

  “Not real ones, of course,” said Waltin with well-acted terror. “God help me, no, I was thinking that since we were at it anyway we might cook up a good story. If you understand what I mean?” He had leaned forward in the well-worn leather armchair and nodded as ingratiatingly as his precarious position allowed.

  “You’re thinking about the days when it was Professor Forselius who held up the mirrors,” grunted the old man while he reached for the carafe of cognac. “Those were different times.”

  What mirrors? thought Waltin. What’s he raving about? Suddenly satisfied and contented?