The Steel Spring

by Per Wahlöö

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ he said. ‘It was utterly absurd.’

  ‘Get to the point,’ said Jensen.

  ‘Just as we’re passing, the man says, “The devil take you, you goddamned riff-raff.” My friend, who’s nearest to him, doesn’t take it in immediately, or maybe he can’t believe his ears. Anyway, he stops and says very politely, “Excuse me?” And the man stares at us and says, all high and shrill: “Bloody rabble, how dare you show your faces here?” None of us have seen this man before, or his wife for that matter, so my friend says: “I’m sorry, but do we know each other?” Then the man grabs his jacket and shouts: “Do you think I don’t recognise you, you damn socialist bastards!” Then the old biddy – yes she really was an old biddy – starts screeching and yanking at the flag my friend’s got under his arm. They’re totally hysterical. The woman manages to grab the flag and hurls it to the ground and starts spitting and stamping on it. Then she whacks my friend’s wife in the head with her handbag as hard as she can and bellows: “Communist whore!” They both seem completely off their heads. The man raises the umbrella as if it’s a rifle with a bayonet and jabs the point in my friend’s chest, several times with full force. My friend falls to his knees and the old biddy grabs him by the hair and tries to kick him. She’s screaming at us the whole time, showering us with spit.’

  The man on the sofa glanced quickly at Jensen and put his hand nervously to his chin.

  ‘I just stood there, absolutely at a loss. I mean, they were old people and it didn’t seem right to lunge out at them. In the end my friend’s wife pushed them aside and grabbed the flag. Then we made off as fast as we could. The last thing we heard was the old man shouting after us.’

  ‘What did he shout?’

  ‘You don’t deserve to live!’

  There was a brief silence. The invalid said:

  ‘I just didn’t get it, and I still don’t. But plenty of other incomprehensible things have happened since. The next day we did at least find out who those people were. A retired bank director and his wife. They had some aristocratic-sounding name. As reactionary as hell, of course, but a very refined and courteous old gentleman. So they say.’

  ‘When did you hold your next demonstration?’

  ‘Exactly a week later. Everything was a good deal rowdier that time. There was a bigger crowd of onlookers, and they were a lot more aggressive than the previous week. The police had brought in reinforcements. We went through with them anyway, the march and the meeting. And we still thought it was to be viewed as a positive development. We even decided to demonstrate more often and on other days of the week, to confuse the opposition. There was a lot of inflammatory stuff about us in the press and on TV just then. But the mass media soon stopped their running commentary on events. Before long they weren’t saying anything about them at all, even in news bulletins. And the papers didn’t write a word. They were full of the usual old froth about film stars and famous people. While society was collapsing about their ears.’

  ‘Collapsing?’

  ‘Yes. Isn’t that what’s happened now?’

  Jensen made no reply.

  ‘Another disturbing thing came to light round about then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In our society we had several members who were doctors and medical students. Nobody had seen them since the beginning of September. One of them was the man who brought me here, your district doctor. They weren’t at home and when we asked about them we got the same unvarying reply: that they’d gone off to attend a conference somewhere. My friend’s wife, who worked at the Ministry of Justice, eventually heard they’d been arrested. We didn’t know if it was true or not.’

  Jensen said nothing.

  ‘Presumably it was true, because practically every doctor with socialist sympathies had vanished. Rumours seeped out that they’d been taken into custody on the orders of the secret police.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as the secret police.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ said the man on the sofa matter-of-factly. ‘I know it exists. Or used to. The girl who worked at the Ministry was able to find out about it. They were called the security services, not the secret police, and they answered directly to the Justice Minister. Their main task seems to have been to keep a register of opinions, a catalogue of individuals with inconvenient political views.’

  Jensen bit his lower lip. After a while he said:

  ‘The Steel Spring. Is that phrase familiar to you?’

  ‘The Steel Spring?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No. I’ve never heard it before.’

  The man grimaced and said:

  ‘My legs are hurting again.’

  ‘Do you want another tablet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One more thing. How did the next demonstration go?’

  ‘Complete uproar. Chaos. Fights breaking out. Hordes of police, but they did the very minimum to protect us. Stones and empty bottles raining down on us. Lots of people wounded, on both sides. Thank God we had no children with us. The fascists, as we’d taken to calling them, were behaving as if they were out of their minds. It was the tenth of October, three weeks before the catastrophe.’

  The man on the sofa tossed his head and gritted his teeth.

  ‘It wasn’t just the fascists who were crazy. Other people started going weird as well. My friend’s wife, for example … can I have that tablet now?’

  ‘In a minute. What was the matter with your friend’s wife?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. Later. Now please let me have that tablet.’

  Jensen put down his notebook. Then he shook a pill out of the tube and slid his hand under the back of the man’s neck.

  CHAPTER 20

  Once the man on the sofa was asleep, Jensen went back to his office. He unlocked the filing cabinet where they kept the orders and rules of general conduct that came in from outside, places such as the police headquarters. He went back to the day when he had handed over command and got out the red folder with the list of the forty-three doctors who were to be arrested. Then sorted quickly through the files for the past three months, selected ten or so and put them on his desk. Sat down and began to study them. They were all red and had the same code name: Steel Spring. Two of them were further arrest lists and the rest were instructions about police conduct at demonstrations and the issue of firearms on such occasions. The first arrest list had a hundred and twenty-five names on it, the second four hundred and sixty. His stand-in had ticked some of the names, presumably those of people they had successfully detained. Other names had annotations like ‘unavailable’ or ‘disappeared’, and many simply had question marks beside them. The annotations were untidy and presumably done in great haste. As far as he could see, the police of the district had not been able to apprehend more than a fifth of them, and most of those were on the first list.

  As with the original arrest order for the forty-three doctors, neither of these communications said who they were from, but on closer inspection he found they bore the seal of the Justice Minister. They also differed from the original list in that they had a short note appended, the same for both of them:

  These people are security risks. They must be apprehended immediately and placed in detention. They will be collected later by security service officers.

  The instructions for general police conduct in connection with street demonstrations also came direct from the Ministry, and when read in chronological order they indicated a clear trend. It was apparent that police efforts to stop street disturbances and riots had escalated markedly through the month of October.

  The orders issued at the very end of September and start of October were pretty routine in nature and dealt mainly with general regulations for the maintenance of law and order and instructions for redirection of traffic. From the tenth of October onwards, the tone stiffened. All reference to protection of demonstrators disappeared and was replaced by talk of forceful intervention to prevent disturbances hostile t
o the state, and on the fifteenth there were directions for all police officers to be armed when on duty. Five days later, the limitations to police use of firearms then in force were lifted until further notice. This was justified with reference to the Riot Act.

  The arrest lists had arrived in swift succession, one on the twenty-fourth and the other on the twenty-sixth of October.

  There was only one red file of any later date in the archive. Its wording was somewhat cryptic:

  In preparation for the anticipated action of the enemies of society on Saturday (2 November) routine surveillance of law and order will be reinforced by special army units. Further orders will be issued by word of mouth.

  This order, too, bore the seal of the Justice Ministry. It was dated the thirty-first of October. According to the diary record, that was the day after large parts of the government and the top police commanders had left the country.

  It was impossible to see which particular office within the Ministry had issued these orders, but they all bore the same code name: Steel Spring.

  Steel Spring must therefore have something to do with the police.

  Inspector Jensen once again consulted his stand-in’s notes in the diary and compared them with what he had written in his own notebook.

  A broad outline emerged.

  From the twenty-first of September onwards, unrest of a political nature had occurred. It had grown more serious through October and culminated on the second of November.

  After that day, calm had been restored and everything had returned to normal.

  Eleven days later, the epidemic had broken out. Although all possible measures had been taken against it, it had reached such proportions that within two weeks, the authorities had lost control of the situation.

  There was no verifiable link between these events.

  Only four or five days previously, the medical authorities had stated that the epidemic was under control. But simultaneously, the state of emergency had been tightened and all lines of communication had been broken.

  Police organisation had collapsed, and evidently all military structure, too.

  These events did not seem to interrelate in any logical way.

  Jensen turned over to another page of his notebook and read the last thing written there, a reminder to himself.

  What was it about his friend’s wife?

  He wrote down two more questions.

  What happened on the second of November?

  What is the Steel Spring?

  He pulled open a desk drawer and took out a transistor-type portable tape recorder.

  The man in the room next door had woken up and was shifting about restlessly. Presumably he was trying to reach the cup of soda.

  CHAPTER 21

  ‘You were right,’ said Jensen. ‘There seems to have been a security service answerable directly to the Justice Minister. I wasn’t aware of that.’

  The man on the sofa laughed.

  ‘That’s great,’ he said, ‘having secret police who are so secret that not even the police know about them. Maybe the people who belonged to it didn’t even know they worked there.’

  ‘That seems unlikely.’

  ‘Perhaps. Thanks to our special contact in the Ministry we were able to find out how the secret police came to be set up. More or less. Would you like me to tell you?’

  ‘Not really. There are two other questions I want answers to.’

  ‘Well I’ll tell you anyway. Some years ago, they did away with the old security police. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It had disgraced itself and become such a laughing stock here and abroad that it just couldn’t be allowed to carry on. So it was abolished, its professionals were pensioned off and the secret registers were burned. It was officially left to the armed services to spy on each other and themselves.’

  Jensen drummed his fingers on his notepad.

  ‘Admittedly the military also kept on making grotesque blunders, like sending planes in over the ports of our socialist neighbours to see if there were any ships there, and trying to send old war criminals in disguise in as spies, putting them ashore from surfaced submarines. It didn’t really matter that the planes were shot down and the infiltrators were caught before they even had time to ask the way to the nearest rocket base. It’s pretty much taken for granted that reactionary military types will behave like lunatics, and anyway, you could always swear black was white and play the injured innocent for public opinion, which they did, at every opportunity. Besides, the military had already sold all the secrets worth selling, to the socialist states for money and to the capitalist countries for a pat on their star-studded shoulders. But the big question was: who was going to spy on ordinary people?’

  Jensen looked uninterestedly out of the window. It had stopped snowing. Drizzle.

  ‘So they made a virtue of necessity and abolished the ludicrous security police and burned its painstakingly but injudiciously compiled opinion register. But before they set fire to it and converted the archive space into a table tennis hall, they took photocopies of the documents and shipped all the material off to the Justice Ministry. And ever since, a few low-profile employees have been sitting there fiddling with their register and the budget they use for paying informers. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘What was strange about your friend’s wife?’

  The man’s expression changed. He looked at Jensen in obvious distress.

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Was that what you were referring to?’

  ‘No. I only brought her up as an example of how people started to react abnormally. It wasn’t just that lot throwing stones and bottles at us and driving their cars into pushchairs, or having hysterics like that reactionary bank director and his senile old bat of a wife, it was people one knew and thought one knew well. She … she suddenly started behaving differently.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘If you’re going to understand this at all, you need to know what sort of person she was, and always had been. I knew her and her husband very well indeed, almost as well as I know myself.’

  He frowned.

  ‘She was a calm, sensible girl. Seemed a bit shy, but that was because she wasn’t a spontaneous person at all. She always considered matters very carefully before she said or did anything, and she was a huge asset to us in the society. Thanks to her ability to keep a cool head, for example, she was able to hang on to that job at the Justice Ministry. She reckoned we’d be able to make good use of it at some stage.’

  ‘Get to the point.’

  ‘If you don’t let me explain the background there’ll be no point to get to.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Like most of our generation, she was physically and mentally damaged by her environment.’

  ‘In what respect?’

  ‘Emotionally. It’s a widespread phenomenon here, and when it occurs in someone whose character is fundamentally lacking in emotion, the result is obvious.’

  ‘Namely?’

  ‘Namely complete absence of sensuality. Zero interest in sex. Why do you think the curve of the birth rate graph looks the way it does in this country?’

  ‘But she was married, after all.’

  ‘That was just for practical reasons.’

  Jensen sat in silence.

  ‘Well anyway, that’s the way she was. But some time in September or early October, she started to change.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She got more worked up, more spontaneous. Seemed very nervy.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘No. One day in the middle of October we were all hard at work at our club premises. I remember it was after the big affray on the tenth, because we were talking about what had happened then. We were weighing up whether to stop the demonstrations for the time being.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Several people had almost lost their lives that last time. Lots had got hurt. Everybody there had been scare
d by the violence and the police passivity. In fact we only ever had one more demonstration.’

  He stopped, staring hollow-eyed at Jensen, and said under his breath:

  ‘The second of November.’

  ‘We’ll come back to that. What happened that day in your club premises?’

  ‘She and I were busy with the duplicating machine; my friend was mending banners and flags that had got ripped on the last march. We were running out of paper and he went out to get some more. We knew it would take him about twenty minutes.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘As soon as he left, she went into the other room. I didn’t really think much about it. She was back almost straight away, and came right up close to me. I didn’t look up until she took my arm. She’d taken off all her clothes. She was standing there stark naked.’

  ‘I see. And then?’

  ‘She stared at me and I stared back. Then she said: “Fuck me. Now. This instant.” She wanted us to have sex.’

  ‘Clearly. Was that all?’

  ‘What more do you expect me to tell you? What she looked like?’

  ‘For example.’

  ‘She had this really odd look in her eyes. Other than that there was nothing remarkable. I’d seen her naked before. In other circumstances, of course.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, in the sauna. When we went swimming. Occasionally when a number of us were sharing a room at a summer camp. We weren’t particularly prudish in our circles. She was a normal girl with little round breasts, small, pale-brown nipples and fairly broad hips. Black hair on her cunt.’

  ‘Mind your language.’

  ‘Genitals then, if you prefer. That was the other strange thing, incidentally. Her genitals. They looked twice their usual size, open, wet, it was running down her thighs. She was standing with her feet wide apart.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I told her to get dressed, of course. But I had to say it five times and even then she only put her shirt on. I got so tired of her that I left before her husband came back.’