“I live here,” said Johansson.
Because Johansson’s big brother was not one to leave anything to chance, not least if he was in cahoots with Mama Elna, for that’s what must have happened, thought Johansson. Obviously they were seated next to each other at the table and had lots of time to talk about both this and that.
“You never called me the way you promised,” said Johansson’s table companion, sounding almost a little hurt when she said it.
How about you, then? thought Johansson, but he didn’t say that. Instead he looked at her with his honest blue eyes and lied.
“Of course I did. I called you the same week I came home from the U.S., and at the switchboard they promised to leave a message,” said Johansson, who knew from experience just how certain such a thing was.
“They’re completely hopeless,” said his table companion with feeling in her voice.
“And then I’ve been really busy,” said Johansson.
Which was at least a bit more true, he thought.
“How do you know my brother, by the way?”
. . .
They had evidently met at a Rotary meeting where the police had been discussed, and only a week later the invitation had come in the mail.
Still, you must have said something else, thought Johansson.
“And because my ex-husband and I had finally decided to go our separate ways, then … well, here I am anyway,” she said, smiling in a manner that could hardly be misunderstood.
He ate and drank, quite a lot even, and then he danced, and he mostly danced with his table companion, and more than once he noticed his big brother’s shrewd grin in the throng behind his back. At the stroke of twelve he gave her a kiss and got a kiss in return, but instead of replying to it he gave her the same wolfish grin that his best friend used to give women when he needed time to think.
“I didn’t think they let women into Rotary,” said Johansson.
“Rotary?” said his table companion, confused and more than a little drunk. “Rotary? You’re probably thinking of the Masons.”
Then a light supper was served in the large kitchen, and even though she didn’t have a fan her intentions were clear enough. And what the hell do I do now? thought Johansson, who suddenly was not the least bit interested. Much less here at home with his own older brother and his gingerbread-colored wife.
“When are you coming to Stockholm next time?” asked Johansson distractingly while he removed his hand from hers, which was only half as large. He could always give the baseball cap he’d bought at the FBI to someone else, he thought.
But it finally resolved itself, and the farewell kiss she gave him before she left in the taxi along with several other guests was sufficiently cool for him to understand that this was probably not the moment for him to change his mind.
“Christ, Lars,” said his brother crossly when they were sitting alone in the large living room in the middle of all the rubbish that the guests had left behind, “you’re starting to lose it.”
“I have a hard time with thin women,” said Johansson, who both knew his brother and knew that his sister-in-law had gone to bed.
“What do you think I’ve said to the wife?” said his brother with feeling. “Thin women are an abomination. But do you think she listens? Hell, no,” he sighed gloomily.
“Skoal,” said Johansson, and then he finally went to bed.
On New Year’s Day after dinner he and his brother sat in front of the TV, not really watching, sipping highballs, and exchanging small talk the way you do when you know each other well and most everything has already been said. On the evening news there was a long, live-broadcast New Year’s interview with the prime minister. According to the introduction, which sounded peaceful enough, it was to have been about what had happened during the year just passed and what was going to happen during the year that had just begun, but it quickly changed to being only about the prime minister himself and his various private doings, and of course it took this turn in a way that was clearly planned from the start. The reporter pulled and tugged at the prime minister like an angry terrier with a trouser leg while the interview victim tried to protect himself with his usual arrogant eloquence; without his having seemed to grasp it, this was the very point of the whole performance.
Those bastards probably can’t even spell “Christmas peace,” thought Johansson, who was just as fond of journalists as all real policemen, but his brother seemed greatly amused.
“Poor devil,” big brother chuckled with delight. “He never learns.”
“You’ve stopped voting for the social democrats,” said Johansson innocently.
“Don’t be an ass, Lars,” said his big brother good-naturedly while he reached for the remote control and switched off the TV.
“I had a salesman once,” said his big brother, “and he was, so help me God, exactly like that wretch that they always come down on so hard as soon as he shows himself on TV.”
“I see,” said Johansson. What should I say? he thought. “So, what was he like?” asked Johansson.
“He was probably the friendliest devil this side of the Dal River,” said Johansson’s brother, laughing a little at the memory as he poured more whiskey into his glass.
“Friendly?”
“Well, he could barely manage to open the hood on the damn car he was showing before he was practically on top of them. Babbling like a windmill about the family and the weather and serving them coffee and almost tying himself in knots to please them. Although they just wanted to buy a car. He was completely unbeatable, the poor bastard.”
They don’t sound especially alike, thought Johansson. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “It must be all the Christmas food, but I don’t really understand.”
“What is it you don’t understand, little brother?” said Johansson’s big brother indulgently.
“They don’t sound especially alike,” said Johansson. “Your salesman and the prime minister, I mean.”
“So help me God he was exactly like the prime minister, except the other way around,” Johansson’s brother clarified. “They were alike as two peas where it counts.”
“I still don’t get it,” persisted Johansson.
“And you’re supposed to be a policeman,” sighed big brother. “Neither of them could keep their distance,” he clarified. “That damn salesman I had was like a Band-Aid without you even having to ask him, and that wretch we just saw on TV with his well-oiled yap would risk making an enemy for life out of any old idiot just to have the last word, when he ought to have the sense just to keep his mouth shut and nod and go along because everyone knows that he knows better.”
Finally, thought Johansson.
“I understand what you mean,” he said. “Did he sell any cars?”
“He must have sold one occasionally,” said Johansson’s brother, shrugging his shoulders. “He got fired. No one can afford that type if you’re going to make a living from it,” he added, taking a good-sized gulp from his glass. “People who aren’t like everyone else, I mean.”
I understand exactly, thought Johansson, who had been to a course and heard the same thing, although expressed in a different way and in other words.
Krassner, he thought. I must do something about that wretched Krassner.
“I’m going to need to work for a few days,” said Johansson. “Do you have a free desk in the house?”
“You can borrow my farm office,” said Johansson’s brother. “No one will disturb you.”
If you’re going to do something anyway, it’s just as well to do it methodically, Johansson always thought, and he did so this time as well, despite the fact that he had seldom felt so ambivalent and poorly motivated. The day after New Year’s Day he carried Krassner’s papers down to the farm office, and when he could finally pack them in his suitcase again it was already Epiphany and high time to go home to Stockholm.
There hadn’t been much vacation, either, between sessions at his borrowed des
k. True, every day he’d taken a long walk, but it was Krassner and his papers that occupied his thoughts the whole time. At the family meals he became more and more monosyllabic, and when his brother suddenly had to go away on business for a few days he almost experienced it as a liberation, despite the fact that they seldom had time to meet.
He’d been forced to drive in to Sundsvall twice to go to the library, and he’d made several calls to Stockholm; he’d spoken on the phone three times with a more and more perplexed Wiklander. But on the day before Epiphany, he was done; he’d even written a long memorandum on how he viewed the matter. What am I really up to? thought Johansson. It was of course not a matter of an ordinary crime investigation, even though he was now convinced that Krassner had been murdered and even though he felt he had a more than reasonable conception of why and how it had been done. He had learned a great deal about the prime minister, he certainly had. He knew just about as much about him as about the perpetrators and victims whose lives he used to survey when he worked investigating especially violent crimes. And a great deal, besides, which only a very few knew about.
The problem, thought Johansson, was simply that however he twisted and turned the matter, the prime minister was neither the perpetrator nor the victim in the part that dealt with Krassner. With the exception of himself, the perpetrator, and a probable few shadowy characters whose existence he could only intuit, everyone else was ignorant not only of this but probably of the entire story. It’ll work out, thought Johansson, for he already had an idea of how he would be able to leave Krassner and his papers behind him.
He devoted the first day to reading through Krassner’s manuscript and the remaining documentation that he’d come across—to get an overview and because he always used to do it that way. That was also the most frustrating day of all, and what irritated him above all else was the author’s way of writing. With the exception of the first chapter, each section was introduced by a text in which the author, at length, with great seriousness and unshakable confidence in his own importance, recounted his feelings and thoughts about the various facts and other circumstances that he later described. And even in the running account there were reflections and passages inserted according to the same pattern. And what a cockeyed style, thought Johansson with irritation, traditional reader that he was, and firmly convinced that a factual condition is best described with facts and only facts, the colder the better. Crap, thought Johansson acidly, pushing aside the piles of papers and deciding it was high time to call it an evening. Besides, his belly was growling seriously.
The following day he finally went to work on the factual questions themselves. From everything that he’d read, what was true, what was false, what was questionable? Krassner’s manuscript began with a sensational story said to have played out in March of 1945 in Stockholm. It was a detailed narrative with names, places, times, and several persons involved in the action. If nothing else that bit could be checked out, thought Johansson.
There were quite certainly several aims behind Krassner’s choice of introduction. A good way to whet the reader’s appetite for what was to follow, besides being a simple and effective presentation of two of the book’s main characters, his own uncle John C. Buchanan and a Swedish mathematics professor by the name of Johan Forselius. The actual aim, however, was quite certainly different—namely, to describe how the Swedish military intelligence service in the final phase of the war had collaborated fully with its American counterpart, and the way in which that might have been done.
The protagonist of the story was a Polish captain by the name of Leszek Matejko. When the Germans attacked his country in September 1939, Matejko was a young lieutenant of the Polish cavalry with its fine old traditions, which was crushed under the treads of the German tank divisions in a matter of days. Matejko had escaped with no more than a fright and a bloody rag around his head, and when the Polish defeat was a fact he succeeded in making his way to England by dangerous paths to continue the fight. Once in London he became one of the first Polish officers enrolled in the “free Polish armed forces.”
Their need of cavalrymen had been limited, but because Lieutenant Matejko was a talented young man he had quickly been made into an intelligence officer, and in that capacity he remained in London during almost the entire war. It was also here that he got his anglicized nickname, Les. In the fall of 1944, when the Russians had driven the Germans a good way back into his old homeland, Captain Les Matejko was moved to the British embassy in Stockholm as a liaison officer, you “hardly needed to be a military person to understand why,” wrote Krassner. Of course, thought Johansson, nodding, for even he understood that, even though he always considered himself highly civilian in outlook. What he didn’t understand, on the other hand, was why Krassner hadn’t continued to write the way he’d started. This could have been really good, thought Johansson, sighing disappointedly.
. . .
At about the same point in time the American major John C. Buchanan showed up at the American embassy in Stockholm where he, almost immediately and apparently quite without embarrassment, seems to have initiated cooperation with his “colleagues” in the Swedish military intelligence service. One of the Swedes he met, with whom he even started to socialize privately, was the professor of mathematics Johan Forselius. According to his nephew the author, and not described particularly respectfully, the friendship was primarily due to the fact that they had another great interest in common besides intelligence activity, namely alcohol. A commodity to which Buchanan, accredited to the American embassy and in contrast with his dried-out Swedish comrade-in-arms, had free and unlimited access.
One more lush, thought Johansson, and before he could read on, for some reason he saw the glass pyramid in Buchanan’s coal cellar again.
Forselius was an interesting person, thought Johansson, making a note on his pad.
Born in 1907, a mathematician and clearly not a bad one: He defended his dissertation at the age of twenty-seven and was named professor at Uppsala University at only thirty-three, approximately the same time as the Germans occupied Denmark and Norway. That was also the point when he had to leave the academic world. Forselius was called up as a regular, noncommissioned officer assigned to the intelligence department at army headquarters as an analyst and code breaker. When he was discharged at the end of the war, in 1945, he was still just a sergeant. At the same time he was a legend among code breakers the world over.
What do you mean, sergeant? thought Johansson, making a new note on his pad. A Swedish sergeant who is a drinking buddy with an American major, professor of mathematics, world-renowned code breaker.…
And is discharged as a sergeant? There’s something here that doesn’t add up, thought Johansson, who had done military service himself and been discharged as a master sergeant.
Late winter in Europe, 1945. A broken-winged German eagle had fallen to the ground. The United States and England and their Soviet allies were perfunctorily striking final blows from their respective positions while their strategic thinking was headed in a completely different direction. How should you position yourself for the decisive test of strength that military logic said must come soon, the struggle between the democracies of the Western world and Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union?
Late winter in Stockholm in 1945, the agents of the Western world flocking together, and here it seemed the choice had already been made, for Forselius and Buchanan and Matejko and all their associates on the right side of the field were completely at home with each other while the talk was of their great new joint concern: the powerful neighbor to the east. It’s then that things started to happen.
Clearly it was Buchanan who sounded the alarm. Despite his anglicized nickname, there was intelligence from the OSS indicating that Captain Leszek “Les” Matejko’s heart was with the Russian comrades-in-arms who would probably soon be the main enemy in the decisive test of strength between good and evil. Considering Matejko’s background and origins, and co
nsidering the overall strategic situation, it was not a simple problem they’d been presented with, and the first decision that had been made was to keep the Englishmen out of it and turn the whole thing into a purely Swedish-American operation.
Forselius got to set the trap, and he’d done it in a very cunning way, by distributing coded messages to various presumptive suspects, then trying to intercept them through the usual radio surveillance to see which way they’d gone.
The suspicions against Matejko had been strengthened, but it was far from being the case that the trap had closed on him, and there were several in their own ranks who not only expressed uncertainty but even pleaded his case. But time was starting to run short, and information came in indicating that Matejko was intending to disappear to his old homeland securely behind the Russian front. In that situation they decided to take no chances, and on the evening of March 10, 1945, an expedition embarked from the military’s secret building on Karlaplan in Stockholm to Matejko’s residence two flights up from the courtyard on Pontonjärsgatan on Kungsholmen.
The mission of the expedition was far from clear. Who had actually dispatched it was shrouded in mystery because in principle of course it concerned a suspected case of espionage, with suspicions directed against a person with diplomatic status. Considering who he was, Matejko was to be approached as carefully as the situation allowed. Try to ascertain his intentions and sympathies, in any event secure his person, and as far as possible do so by peaceful means. Whose decision this actually was, however, is not evident from Krassner’s manuscript. He doesn’t seem to have even understood the problem.
The expedition had five members, and its composition was strange, to say the least: professor and conscript Sergeant Johan Forselius and Major John C. Buchanan, both in civilian clothes; Second Lieutenant Baron Casimir von Wrede; Second Lieutenant Sir Carl Fredrick Björnstjerna; and Captain Count Adam Lewenhaupt, all three of the last-named officers in the intelligence service’s security detail, dressed in uniform and armed with service pistol model 40. The whole company rode in a gasoline-powered black 1941 Buick, Buchanan’s service car from the embassy, and it was Buchanan who drove. What the others possibly didn’t know was that he had also brought along “his only friend in life,” the American Army’s .45-caliber Colt pistol.
Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End Page 47
