Hedberg, thought Berg as the booming increased in his head; he’d probably sensed it the whole time, but he hadn’t thought of asking. Why must he always talk about the wrong things? thought Berg. Sometimes I get the idea he’s a complete idiot, he thought.
“Krassner is history,” said Berg, making an effort to sound as though it really was that way, “so I don’t think we even need to think about that. Do you think you can get a preliminary study to the meeting with them next week?”
“Of course, no problem at all,” said Waltin courteously, and then they moved on to talk about other things. Berg was almost preoccupied and looked as though he needed a long vacation, which suited Waltin just fine.
When he came out of the police building after the meeting with Berg he was in such a good mood that, despite the cold, he decided to walk down to the city center, where he could meet completely normal people who wanted him to help them increase the security of their economic operation and were willing to pay for it. He hadn’t even left the block before one of the Stockholm Police Department’s riot-squad vans glided up alongside him. Next to the driver sat Berg’s retarded nephew, and the only reasonable interpretation of this was that he and his simian friends had been let off on all the complaints and had now gone back to duty. Young Berg sat with the window rolled down and his burly arm supported against the door frame, and the cold was unlikely to be the reason he was also wearing black leather gloves. And because Waltin was a civilized person he was finally compelled to say something.
“Is there something I can help you gentlemen with?” said Waltin without slowing his pace.
“Just checking that everything’s calm,” said Berg. “Trying to maintain general order and security.”
“Feels reassuring to hear that we’re on the same side,” said Waltin, congratulating himself for his imperturbability.
“Makes us happy too,” said Berg, suddenly sounding as sullen as a child. “We haven’t always had that impression.”
It was then that Waltin got his idea. A pure impulse, for how in the name of heaven could psychopaths be able to injure him, and it was high time he made that clear to them.
Waltin just stopped, and because the driver hadn’t managed to put on the brakes he was forced to back up a yard before Berg again had eye contact with Waltin.
“It’s probably not me you should be worried about,” said Waltin lightly, glancing at his watch. “And if you gentlemen are going downtown anyway you can drive me to Norrmalmstorg,” he said. And you should certainly be careful about playing poker, thought Waltin when he saw the surprised shift in Berg’s expression. Of course he also waited until the driver jumped out and held open the door for him. It’s not just your uncle who can shut things down, thought Waltin as he climbed into the van.
When Berg arrived at the weekly meeting the special adviser wasn’t there. Berg glanced inquiringly at his empty seat as he sat down, and the minister of justice nodded with a worried expression.
“Unfortunately he had to run off,” said the minister. “It was a close friend of his who passed away. He sends greetings, by the way, and regrets that he couldn’t be here.”
Close friend of his, thought Berg, astonished. Wonder what such a person is made of? But naturally he hadn’t said that. Saying such a thing would probably be the last thing he’d do, he thought.
First he took up the ongoing survey of extreme right-wing elements within the police; he started by recounting the disturbing observations that Waltin had reported to him the day before.
“We unfortunately have encountered certain problems with our data collection,” said Berg cryptically.
“Is it the computers that are causing trouble again?” asked the minister without the slightest hidden motive.
“If it were only that good,” said Berg, shaking his head. “No, unfortunately it’s worse than that, I’m afraid.”
And when he’d said A he might just as well say B, he thought.
“A couple of our field agents, infiltrators, as certain people say, have expressed concern that they might be at risk of being unveiled, so we’ve been compelled to bring them home to the building and break off,” said Berg. “We must find some way to regroup before we can continue.”
“Good Lord,” said the minister with genuine concern. “There isn’t any risk that something will happen to them, is there?”
What would that be? thought Berg. We’re living in Sweden, after all, and it’s policemen we’re talking about. Both my own men and the ones they’re spying on.
“It probably needn’t turn out that badly,” said Berg soothingly.
“Nice to hear,” said the minister, appearing sincerely relieved.
Under the “remaining questions” point, and before they departed, Berg only let it be known that they were in the process of putting together the requested preliminary study about the external operation, giving it the highest priority, and that he counted on being able to submit it at the next meeting. The minister of justice seemed almost embarrassed as he said that, and the chief legal officer suddenly excused himself and took off.
“I believe perhaps our friend from the Cabinet Office expressed himself less well than he might have the last time we met,” said the minister, clearing his throat and casting a meaningful glance at the relevant person’s empty chair.
“Far be it from me to question either your viewpoints or your motives,” said Berg courteously. For I’m not that stupid, he thought.
“I haven’t thought that, either,” said the minister cordially, “but I have tried to speak with our mutual friend in order to get him to understand that this is such a complicated affair: It really is something that bears thinking about in peace and quiet. It’s not something you should be rash about, I mean.”
The minister leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Without being indiscreet,” he continued, “it was actually he who asked me for advice on a related matter, and so I also took the opportunity to say what I thought about this.”
I see, thought Berg. So that’s how it went.
“And I actually succeeded in convincing him,” said the minister contentedly.
“Nice to hear,” said Berg, despite the fact that the only thing he was really hearing were the alarm bells ringing in his own head.
“It will have to take the time it takes,” declared the minister with a confirming nod. “For me it will be just fine if we can clear this up sometime during the spring.”
What is it they’re really up to? thought Berg as he stepped out through the doors to Rosenbad. At an internal seminar they’d had at work, the lecturer had described something that was evidently called Anderson’s Confusion Strategy, after the American psychologist who had invented this method, which was dubious, to say the least. Evidently what the whole thing amounted to was that you continually sent contradictory messages to the person you were out to get, while at the same time oscillating between cordiality and threats. According to the lecturer, in a normal case it only required a rather small dose of this before the object was ready for both the pillbox and the straitjacket.
That can’t be what he’s up to, thought Berg, and the one he was thinking about was the prime minister’s special adviser. Although it’s clear. He’s certainly capable of most anything, thought Berg.
It was Forselius’s Polish cleaning woman who had found her employer. He was lying dead right inside his own front door when she opened it, and as she had studied medicine at the university in Lodz before she finally succeeded in getting from there to Sweden and the Swedish social home service, she had no problem at all with that. Forselius was dead; everything indicated that he had died rather recently and that he had probably suffered a stroke. In addition, as usual he was wearing his stained dressing gown and reeked of cognac.
His cleaning woman had dialed the telephone number she was supposed to dial if something happened and almost immediately a number of people had arrived. All of them men, all of them both friendly and taciturn, and one of
them certainly also a doctor.
So it figured that he’d been some sort of high-ranking spy, she thought, but with her background this wasn’t something you talked about. Then one of them had driven her home, told her she shouldn’t worry, that she would be off work the rest of the week, that she would nonetheless get her pay as usual, that she wasn’t to talk with anyone about what had happened, and that he or one of his colleagues would get back to her if there was anything more.
That suited her fine. Forselius had been more troublesome than all the others she cleaned for combined. She’d gone to the day care and fetched her little boy and then they’d played the whole afternoon in a park that was in the vicinity of their apartment.
The special adviser arrived right after the people from the military intelligence department but a good while before the bunglers from the secret police, who, unfortunately, had to take care of the formalities.
They’d known each other for more than twenty years, but when he looked at the old man there on his own hallway rug he was forced to ask himself what he really felt. Sorrow? Regret? Worry? Nothing in particular?
“Do you have any idea what he died of?” he said to his own doctor, who was kneeling over the body.
“You mean what he didn’t die of,” said the doctor, smiling wryly and shaking his head. “Well,” he continued, sighing dejectedly. “That will no doubt be seen in the autopsy, but if you want a preliminary guess I believe he had a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was actually almost eighty, even if he refused to realize that.”
A shame about a brain like that, thought the special adviser.
When they went through the contents of Forselius’s wallet, a sturdy, old-fashioned affair of brown leather that he always carried in his back pocket, they found a folded-up envelope with a handwritten text in Forselius’s handwriting: “In the event of my death.” In the envelope was a slip of paper with another brief, handwritten message, “You should die when it’s the most fun, JF,” and judging by the usual forensic indications he might very well have written that a half-century ago when he was sitting in the secret building on Karlaplan, breaking codes.
I’ll be damned, thought the special adviser. I miss him already.
CHAPTER XVII
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Mallorca in February
Hedberg had returned from the humid heat on Java to his little house on northern Mallorca where he’d been living in forced exile for almost the past decade. When he landed at the airport in Palma he’d been met by a cooling, early summer wind—it was almost seventy degrees even though it was only the first week in February—so in any event he couldn’t complain about the weather. He picked up his car from long-term parking where he’d left it a good month earlier and then drove home to the house in the mountains north of Alcudia. There were worse days than this, he thought.
Not all his days had been good. Considering that he hadn’t even been called for questioning, much less indicted or convicted, he’d nonetheless been subjected to a shocking assault on his rights. Naturally he’d been allowed to retain his job, but all the whispering in the corridors, the sudden silence when he came into the break room, colleagues who openly avoided him, all this had nonetheless made it impossible for him. Besides, he didn’t feel at home behind a desk. And all just because he’d tried to protect himself against a small-time gangster and a bum who tried to extort him for money that was rightfully his.
When he got the invitation to come over to the external operation and work for Waltin it almost felt like a liberation. There had been plenty of money too, a few times there had actually been quite a lot, and he liked Waltin. He was a talented guy with a lot of charm and quite a few interesting ideas. Besides, Hedberg knew that he could trust Waltin, almost as if they’d been brothers and grown up together, despite the fact that they really didn’t see each other all that often.
So he’d been all the more surprised when he went through the papers that he’d taken from that American journalist and at first had intended to get rid of in some secure way. Not that his English was like Waltin’s, but in any case he knew enough to understand most of what was there, and for a while he’d even gotten the idea that Waltin had duped him.
But the more he thought about it, the more unbelievable it seemed. It was probably no more complicated than that Berg and those social democrats in the new government that he worked for were in league with each other and that Waltin had been duped just as much as himself. Berg with his sanctimonious exterior and his well-oiled mouth was naturally the one they’d turned to in order to remove the embarrassing files the American was sitting on. Documents that showed what every thinking person ought to have been able to figure out on their own: that the country was being run by a traitor and a Russian spy. True, Hedberg hadn’t been aware that in addition he’d managed to worm his way in with the CIA in his youth, but considering all the other things he’d done, such as have his best friend murdered, for example, that had hardly come as a surprise. Nor that he got away with it that time either. Of course people like that always get away with it.
Waltin was probably as fundamentally duped as he was, and considering what had happened it was just as well. How would he have been able to discuss this with Waltin? It would have been the same as signing your own life sentence. If only he’d been certain that he could trust Waltin completely, then he wouldn’t have hesitated a moment to tell him the whole thing. The problem was that during his entire life he hadn’t met a single person who had shown themselves to be completely reliable when it really counted. So it was also wisest to keep quiet about what he knew. At least until he could be sure that not only Krassner but the whole affair really was dead and buried.
. . .
Actually it was he who was the real victim. He would never have dreamed of even defending himself against such a person as Krassner, if he’d only known who he was and what he was working on. On the contrary, he would have treated him to a beer or two, for he’d earned it, considering the job he was working on. He hadn’t had any choice, and exactly like the time before he’d only tried to defend himself.
Suddenly he’d just stuck the key in the lock and stepped right in, and because Hedberg had been standing on the other side of the door in a narrow coat closet there hadn’t been anywhere to go. And instead of asking him what he was doing there—he was, after all, dressed like an ordinary laborer, so he ought to have thought of that—Krassner had just attacked him and started by trying to head-butt him, and then when he’d dropped him to the floor he’d first tried to knee him and then bite him, and in that situation Hedberg no longer had any choice. He’d been forced to defend himself, and unfortunately he’d happened to break Krassner’s neck along the way. Pure self-defense, and if there was anyone who was a victim in this story it was he. To start with he had of course been duped into it, exploited in order to protect the greatest traitor in Swedish history.
The rest had been pure routine. He’d thought about throwing him out through the window from the start. For what else could he have done? The guy couldn’t just lie there. But because he still had to photograph his papers, he’d happened to see that introduction that he’d written to his book, and when he’d looked at it it had suddenly struck him that this was a typical suicide note, and then there wasn’t too much left to think about. He’d sorted a suitable pile for that traitor Berg and those other idiots, kept the rest for himself, and seen to it that it all appeared normal. Most of the time had gone to changing the ribbon in the typewriter and typing a new, similar suicide note, which he’d then put in his pocket and taken with him. He’d put the real one in the typewriter, and he’d seen that there were prints on it when he held it up against the lamp. Thank the devil for that, by the way. It was of course actually Krassner who had written it.
Then he’d broken loose the catch on the window, lifted him up, and thrown him out. Rather a grand sight, actually, as he fell straight down, and it was only when he hit the ground th
at he’d seen the bum who was prowling along the building exterior with his mangy pooch and almost got the whole package right in the face. When he’d pulled in his head so as not to be unnecessarily visible, he’d seen that one shoe had evidently fallen off when he was wriggling the body out through the rather narrow window. It wouldn’t do to have it lying on the floor, so he’d picked it up to throw it out too, and because the bum had just been standing there glaring with his silly little dog he’d made a serious attempt to put it right in his cap. Although this time it wasn’t exactly a quarter, like when the bums were sitting down in the subway begging change for liquor. Unfortunately he’d missed and instead hit the pooch, which had folded up and lain down flat on the ground. And nothing more than that had happened. He’d just packed up, made a final quick check, and left the place. The rest had been a question of maintaining a good face, which wasn’t too difficult since Waltin was the only person he needed to talk to.
Typical suicide, if anyone were to get the idea of asking him. One of the most typical he’d heard about, actually, with a letter left behind and the whole shebang. Ought to sit like a sports cap on those retarded policemen in Stockholm, thought Hedberg, and then he hadn’t thought about it again.
CHAPTER XVIII
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Stockholm in February
The Stockholm chief constable had received very positive reactions to his New Year’s greeting in the police department’s newspaper. Many people had contacted him, both inside and outside the corps, not least many women who had been tremendously appreciative. All this warmth coming his way had strengthened him in his conviction that perhaps it was high time that he realized yet another of his visions.
Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End Page 55
