Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End

by Leif Gw Persson

  Whatever. Early on Thursday morning, the thirty-first of October, Martinsson’s immediate chief made a phone call to Waltin. Might the police superintendent have a chance to meet with him and young Martinsson? They had possibly found an in to Krassner.

  “Tell me,” said Waltin and nodded toward Martinsson, who was on the other side of the gigantic desk, admiring himself in the mirror on the wall behind Waltin’s back. “Göransson, here,” Waltin, with a turn of his head indicated Martinsson’s twenty-years-older and somewhat balding boss, “is saying you’ve found an opening for us.”

  Martinsson nodded. Leafed through his black notebook with his sleeves rolled up so that the surrounding world would be able to enjoy the play of muscles on his forearms.

  “I believe so, chief,” said Martinsson. “It was me and the guy who took over his case yesterday evening.”

  “I see,” said Waltin, pinching his well-pressed trousers.

  “It was the press club as usual. I went along inside. He was talking with a few of our own assets and among others with that Wendell from Expressen, and he had some younger female hacks with him, one of them had fucking decent tits. Lots of ladies around that man—Wendell, that is.”

  “Yes,” said Waltin and sighed quietly. Get to the point if you don’t want to go back to the patrol cars, he thought.

  “He left right before one, and for once he was a little drunk—he had five beers instead of the normal two. He’s a little guy,” Martinsson said in a tone of voice that naturally followed from the fact that he was twice as big and four times as strong.

  Whatever that has to do with things, thought Waltin, who himself was just slightly above average height.

  “So I followed him on foot,” said Martinsson.

  And here I thought you were watching him from the air, thought Waltin wearily. “Yes,” he said.

  “He took the direct route down to doper square and the first person he runs into is Svulle Svelander.”

  “Svulle?” said Waltin.

  “Jan Svulle Svelander, well-known pusher, well-known junkie, he’s been at it since Noah’s ark. Tattooed over his whole body so he looks like a Brussels carpet. Has a rap sheet long enough to wind it twice around a hot-dog stand.”

  “And what did they do then?” asked Waltin, even though he already knew the answer.

  “He bought grass,” said Martinsson. “Krassner bought grass from Svulle. A fucking lot of grass, in fact.”

  CHAPTER VII

  Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End

  Albany, New York, in December

  [SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8]

  It wasn’t like along the Ångerman River; there it was flatter and broader, and the water usually flowed gray and turgid between the green, forest-clad hills, which faded into blue and disappeared along with the sky far away. The sky was always blue when it was summer, and Lars Martin and Mama and Papa and all his siblings used to take the car and trailer down to Kramfors to do shopping and see Aunt Jenny and live it up in town and eat herring and meatballs and watch Papa swallow his shots from Aunt Jenny’s cut-crystal glass.

  “How you doing, kids?” Papa used to say and wink at them just before he drank his shot, and then he used to tousle Lars Martin’s hair because he was the littlest of the ones whose hair he could still tousle. Lars Martin’s little sister was of course even smaller, but she was so little that she mostly lay in her basket and peeped when she didn’t get the breast from Mama, and Papa never used to tousle her hair.

  One time when Lars Martin came out onto the farmyard he had seen his father lift up the whole basket and the baby carriage in which it sat, and then his father had walked around with his little sister and the basket and the baby carriage and said something that Lars Martin didn’t hear. He had just hugged it all and put his head down into the basket and mumbled something. Then Lars Martin got sad and decided to leave it all behind, and he walked on the old road south toward Näsåker, and when he had been walking for several hours, and there really wasn’t any way back, his big brother had suddenly shown up and taken him by the arm and asked him what in the name of all the devils of hell he was up to. Then he got to sit on his big brother’s shoulders the whole way home and it wasn’t at all as far as he had thought. And pretty soon he stopped crying too.

  But this was something else, thought Lars Martin Johansson from his comfortable window seat. For this was no river in Ångermanland but rather an American river, and sometimes it was deep and sometimes it was shallow and sometimes it was narrow and sometimes it was broad and all together it was exactly like the rivers in the matinee films that he used to see at the cinema at Folkets Hus back home in Näsåker when he was only a child. Drums were heard in the background, and Indians built fires and sent smoke signals to each other and the cavalry came galloping with only minutes to spare while the trumpets blared and he and all the other kids in Näsåker cheered.

  He hadn’t discovered any Indians, but after a little less than an hour’s journey he had seen the star-spangled banner fluttering on a high promontory on the opposite side of the river. West Point, thought Johansson, feeling the draft from the right wing of the eagle of history sweep past him at rather close range, and less than two hours later he was there. There was whirling snow in the air and the temperature was in the midteens, and there was only one taxi in the parking lot outside the station.

  “Two-hundred-and-twenty-two Aiken Avenue,” said Johansson and leaned back in the seat while he pondered what he would say. If she’s even home, he thought gloomily, for suddenly he regretted the entire trip and even that he had gone to the United States at all, which had actually been decided long before and didn’t have a thing to do with his private expedition.

  . . .

  Best to let the taxi wait until I see that she’s home, thought Johansson when they had stopped outside a large white house with a porch, mansard roof, at least two bay windows, and a tree decorated with lights on the drive.

  “Can you wait?” Johansson asked the taxi driver, who nodded, shrugged his shoulders, and mumbled something he didn’t hear.

  Big house, thought Johansson. It stands to reason that she would have a family, although she was listed alone in the phone book; if there was a man in the house, snow-shoveling was clearly not his great passion. Johansson congratulated himself yet again on the purchase of his new American shoes, and now he was standing on her porch and lights were on inside and he even heard music, and there really was no going back. Johansson sighed, took a deep breath, and rang the doorbell.

  She was small, with a mop of frizzy red hair. Rather pretty, thought Johansson when she nodded at him with polite expectation, making note of his taxi down on the driveway from the corner of her eyes.

  “I am looking for Sarah Weissman,” said Johansson politely.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s me.”

  “My name is Lars M. Johansson,” said Johansson.

  “Finally,” she said and smiled broadly with white teeth. “An honorable Swedish cop. Guess if I’ve been waiting.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  Free falling, as in a dream

  Stockholm in November

  Waltin’s entire childhood had revolved around illness, suffering, and death; it was his mother who led him onto that path at an early stage. As long as he could recall—his first memories went back to the age of three—she had been steadily dying of everything that could possibly be looked up from A to Z in The Home Medical Book, and treatment or relief were all too seldom to be found in her own dog-eared copy of The Complete Drug Reference. There was a daily drama in their existence together as they were tossed between her acute gallstone inflammations, colic, migraines, and asthma attacks. There was also a more drawn-out suffering in the form of a cancer that was eating her up from the inside while psoriasis, all kinds of allergies, and common eczema nibbled away at her exterior. There was also a mother’s heart, which like a flickering flame pressed her thin blood cells through hopelessly atrophied and calcified
blood vessels while her lungs, liver, and kidneys continuously failed. She spent most of her time at various hospitals, rest homes, and doctor’s offices while little Claes and his upbringing were left to a slightly retarded housekeeper his mother had inherited from her father, who, practically enough, had been a wealthy man who had had the good taste to die early.

  Waltin had few memories of his own father, because for the most part he had been absent until he disappeared for good when little Claes was about five and his father moved to Skåne to marry his mistress. It was then that his mother had finally been offered the opportunity to add a more psychiatrically oriented aspect to her disease profile.

  Waltin promised his mother at an early age that he would become a doctor when he grew up. When he and his playmates captured bumblebees and grasshoppers in matchboxes, his friends used to play radio, but he chalked a red cross on the matchbox and used it as an ambulance. The patients were often in bad shape and they were immediately transported to the Claes Waltin Clinic, where the professor and head of the clinic himself operated on them with a surgical kit he had borrowed from his mother’s sewing box, but despite all the resources that he brought to bear, as a rule all was in vain and mortality was total. It was only dear mother who survived, year after year after year, completely against the astronomical odds of her continual and immediate demise.

  When at last his mother departed earthly life, it was in the most unexpected and banal manner. Bloated on port wine and high on pills, she had fallen off the platform at the Östermalm subway station en route to her daily visit to the doctor; it had taken a whole train to put an end to her lifelong suffering. Claes was at the university, studying law. He had given up his plans to become a doctor long before, which was practical considering his wretched grades. As a human being he was fully formed; lies were the breath of life for him; he was a warm and very charming psychopath with a strong interest in women, whom he hated deeply and heartily, without realizing it. When his dear mother finally died it had been the first real step forward in his life.

  He had also found her will in the nick of time, which undoubtedly spared him a great deal of hardship. It was twenty pages long and began with a long list of donations to various organizations for the most frequently occurring causes of death, with the exception of tropical diseases. The funeral was not to be shabby either, and the list of specially invited mourners included fifty-some members of the capital’s medical profession in private practice. He himself chose a more practical solution: a coffin of pressed cardboard with a funeral pall that the parish loaned out for free, no flowers, and no one invited and how sweet the sound, and as soon as the touching ceremony was over and done with—he had wept for joy the whole time—he had seen to it that they cremated the old lady and tossed out the ashes in a wooded area of the northern cemetery where there was no risk that he would end up even by chance.

  . . .

  His good luck had also held up during the following years. He had completed a degree in law so mediocre that he would scarcely have been able to serve in court in Haparanda. He couldn’t even intern in a prosecutor’s office, so the only thing that remained was to apply to police-chief training. This he had managed brilliantly, and he had celebrated his degree by sticking a chair leg up the vagina of a simple woman of the people, just a little too far. But fortunately she had the good judgment not to file a complaint, contenting herself with financial compensation that he could easily afford. He decided to truly exert himself in the future to improve his precision in the sexual arena. His fantasies were fragile things, his sexual instincts a constant balancing act, difficult enough without an unsympathetic environment becoming informed of his somewhat special preferences.

  Then he met Berg, who wasn’t even half as shrewd as everyone believed, and Berg had picked him for the secret police. Then when the time was ripe and the external operation started to be built up he had become its first head, and as such he was successful, well liked, and in all essentials invulnerable. Certainly there were problems, but problems existed to be solved and he had seldom lost the game. He wasn’t planning to do so now either, when it was a matter of finding out what this mysterious character John P. Krassner was actually up to with his wanderings from the student dormitory where he was living to various libraries and archives, and regular evening visits to the press club’s bar on Vasagatan.

  That fool Martinsson had given him a possible way in, and because this was Berg’s project he had discussed it with him thoroughly. What did Berg think about turning the matter into a normal narcotics case? A simple house search where first you put Krassner in the pokey and scared the shit out of him, then went through his earthly and intellectual possessions in peace and quiet. Berg had been unencouraging to say the least, and in a way that signaled that he had carefully prepared his counterarguments.

  Krassner was a very sly type, Berg maintained, however it was he knew that—for according to Waltin’s own little female informant he seemed mostly nervous, high-strung, and increasingly paranoid—and under no circumstances was he to be alerted before they had found out what little secrets he was sitting on. Should it prove that these were pure products of imagination, Berg obviously had no objections to concluding the whole thing with an indictment for narcotics-related crimes for which Krassner would get a month or two at a Swedish correctional facility before being deported. But that was out of the question before they were completely sure of the matter. If Krassner was dealing in hard goods, a narcotics intervention could even backfire and be seen as an unadulterated provocation on the part of the secret police, a planting of evidence with the simple intention of concealing shocking things of a completely different magnitude.

  “We both well know how such things are,” Berg asserted. “Just think about those so-called Information Bureau whistle-blowers. They were out and running around again before the ink had time to dry on their convictions. One year for spying, that’s not even a bad joke.”

  Waltin contented himself with nodding, for he already saw the practical consequences, and, as he was the one who would be handling them, there was no reason at all to discuss them with anyone, least of all with the person who was his boss.

  “I’m counting on you, Claes, and I also believe we’re starting to be short on time.” Berg nodded seriously, and with that, everything that needed to be said was said.

  What remained was quite simply an ordinary break-in, thought Waltin. Or more correctly stated, an uncommon break-in, as the victim of the crime wouldn’t even be allowed to suspect that he had had a visitor in that home, which, however temporary, was nonetheless his castle. This wasn’t the first time Waltin had planned such an effort. On the contrary, he had done it so often that nowadays he only had an approximate sense of the number of “concealed house searches” in his top-secret personal record. No big deal about that, besides, for the classified special legislation that the government had put in the hands of the organization he served gave him and his cohorts all the room for action they needed.

  It wasn’t the legal problems that worried him. It was the purely practical execution of the effort that seriously disturbed him. To enter through a window bolted from the inside situated on the sixteenth story was completely out of the question, even if he had the option of lowering someone from the room above. But because it was rented out to a known left-wing activist who used his free time to sell The Proletarian outside the city’s state liquor stores and was otherwise always sitting home thinking up various activities to bring down society, he didn’t even need to consider that alternative. Besides, hundreds of people lived on the other side of the street; based on experience, at least a few of them would discover what was going on and immediately contact the police department’s central switchboard. And as there was a good chance that the person concerned might fall and be killed, there would certainly be no lack of available patrol cars that would pounce on such a call.

  What remained was to go in the normal way. Through the door to the corridor where e
ight rooms and seven different renters were squeezed together into just over a thousand square feet. Krassner’s room was at the far end. These were not ordinary renters, either. Two of them were in SePo’s register of various leftist movements. The third was that South African the socialist union had dragged here, and you hardly needed to work for the secret police to calculate where he stood politically. The fourth was Krassner himself, almost paranoid according to the operative on the scene. Remaining were an apparently well-trained student at GIH who had head-butted a security guard when he was in high school, along with a technologist and a student at the business school about whom he didn’t know anything negative that was documented. A real dream audience for a break-in, Waltin thought.

  The lock itself wasn’t a complicated one, and copies of the keys to the corridor door and to Krassner’s room had been acquired with the help of an upright coworker at the property-management company that took care of the building. Of course he had done his part for the police detectives in their fight against drugs. He had kids himself and knew what it was about. “Just squeeze those damn pushers.” At the same time keys were the least problem when you were working at Waltin’s level; there were other things that troubled him more. How could he see to it that one of his most reliable officers could, undisturbed, make his way into Krassner’s room to go through his papers and other belongings in peace and quiet? He would need at least an hour. Little Jeanette Eriksson had offered to do it herself, but that was completely out of the question for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with risks. In Waltin’s world this was not something that young women should be involved in. It was bad enough that she had made use of that black guy in order to get in the vicinity of Krassner. Now it was a matter of bringing her back home to headquarters as quickly as possible.