Murder on the Thirty-First Floor

by Per Wahlöö

The doctor looked at Jensen. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, and there was a faint smell of alcohol that did not seem to be coming from the man he was just injecting.

  ‘That takes strength and a heck of a lot of willpower,’ said the doctor. ‘And you have to tear the soundproof padding off the wall first.’

  Most of those who had just been released were standing there with hands in pockets and heads hanging apathetically. There was no terror or despair in their faces any longer, just emptiness.

  Inspector Jensen went up to his office, got out one of his cards and made two notes.

  Better wall padding.

  New doctor.

  The room held nothing of interest for him this time, either, and he left it almost immediately.

  It was twenty past eight.

  CHAPTER 18

  The suburb was twenty kilometres or so south of the city, and in the category the experts at the Ministry for Social Affairs liked to call ‘self-clearance areas’.

  It had been built at the time of the big housing shortage and consisted of about thirty tower blocks, ranged symmetrically round a bus station and a so-called shopping centre. The bus route had been axed and nearly all the shops were boarded up. The big, paved piazza was used as a car graveyard, and only about twenty per cent of the flats in the tower blocks were occupied.

  Inspector Jensen located the address he was looking for with some difficulty, parked the car and got out. The block of flats was fourteen storeys high, and in the places where the plaster had peeled away the walls were black with damp. The paving in front of the main entrance was strewn with broken glass, and the vegetation of scrubby trees and bushes had pushed its way right up to the concrete base of the building. Their roots would eventually undermine the foundations.

  The lift wasn’t working and he had to walk up to the ninth floor. The stairwell was cold and dirty and badly lit. Some of the doors were open, revealing rooms just as people had left them, littered and draughty, with long cracks in ceilings and walls. It was apparent from the smell of frying food and the boom of presenters’ voices from morning TV programmes that some of the flats were still lived in. The walls and double floors seemed to have no soundproofing effect at all.

  Inspector Jensen was breathing quite heavily after five sets of stairs, and by the time he got right up to the flat his chest was tight and the right side of his diaphragm ached badly. After a few minutes, his breathing was more regular again. He took out his police ID and knocked at the door.

  The man opened it at once. He said:

  ‘Police? I’m teetotal, have been for years.’

  ‘Inspector Jensen from the Sixteenth District. I’m conducting an investigation that has to do with your former employment and place of work.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘A few questions.’

  The man shrugged. He was well dressed, and had a thin face and a resigned look in his eyes.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  The flat was of the standard type, as were the furnishings. There was a shelf with about ten books on it, and on the table were a cup of coffee, some bread, butter and cheese and a magazine.

  ‘Please have a seat.’

  Jensen looked about him. The flat resembled his own in all the essentials. He sat down and got out his pen and notepad.

  ‘When did you cease your employment?’

  ‘Last December, just before Christmas.’

  ‘You handed in your notice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Had you worked for the group for long?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  The man drank some of his coffee. Then he looked at the ceiling.

  ‘It’s a long story. I scarcely think it can be of any interest to you.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  ‘Okay, I’m not hiding anything, but it’s a bit hard to explain how it all happened.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘To start with, the statement that I left of my own volition is a modification of the truth.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘It would take days, and you still might not understand. I can only give you a summary of the actual chain of events.’

  He paused.

  ‘But first I want to know why. Am I suspected of anything?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You won’t say what, I take it?’

  ‘No.’

  The man stood up and went over to the window.

  ‘I came here when all these flats were newly built,’ he said. ‘It’s not that long ago. Just after that I was taken on by the group, more or less by unhappy accident.’

  ‘Unhappy accident?’

  ‘I worked for another paper before; I don’t suppose you remember it. It was run by the socialist party and the trade union movement, and it was the last weekly of any size left in the country that was independent of the group. It had certain ambitions, not least in the cultural sphere, though the climate on that front was getting difficult even then.’

  ‘Cultural ambitions?’

  ‘Yes, it made the case for good art and poetry, printed short literary fiction and so on. I’m no expert on that side of things; I was a reporter, dealing with social and political issues.’

  ‘Were you a socialist?’

  ‘I was a radical. In fact, I was on the extreme left wing of the socialist party, though I didn’t realise it myself.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The paper wasn’t doing spectacularly. It didn’t make much profit, but it didn’t make a loss either. A fair number of people read it and depended on it. It was the only real counterweight to the group’s papers, and it opposed the group and the publishing house and criticised them, sometimes actively, and sometimes by its mere existence.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Through polemic, leaders, open criticism. By dealing with various issues honestly. That lot in the Skyscraper hated it of course, and hit back in their own way.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By publishing more, and ever more trivial, comics and story magazines; by exploiting people’s general tendency.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘To like looking at pictures better than reading, and if they read anything at all to prefer meaningless drivel to things that force them to think or make an effort or take a stance. That’s how it was even then, I’m afraid.’

  He stayed at the window, his back to his visitor.

  ‘The phenomenon was known as intellectual laziness and was one of the temporary unhealthy consequences of the TV age, it was said.’

  A jet plane roared over the house in the direction of an airport many kilometres further south. From it, large groups of people were daily flown abroad to spend their annual weeks of recreation at a few chosen destinations where conditions were suitable. The operation was organised to the very limits of what was feasible. Jensen had once been on a trip of that kind, and he did not intend to repeat the experience.

  ‘Back then, a lot of people still thought the rising levels of impotence and frigidity were the result of radioactive fallout. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, the Skyscraper group couldn’t get at our readership. It wasn’t that large but it was consolidated, made up of people who really needed the paper. For them it was the last breathing hole in the sugar glaze. I think that was the main reason the publishing house always loathed us. But they couldn’t break us, we thought.’

  He turned round and looked at Jensen.

  ‘I’ll have to compress everything. I did say it couldn’t all be explained in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Go on. What happened?’

  The man gave a wan smile and went back to the sofa, where he sat down.

  ‘What happened? The most sordid thing imaginable. They bought us, it was as simple as that. Lock, stock and barrel: our staff and our ideology and the whole damn lot. For money. Or to put it another way: the party and the trade union movement sold us, to the opposing camp
.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s not easy to explain, either. We were at a crossroads. The Accord was starting to take shape. It’s a long time ago now. Do you know what I think?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That it was just about the time when socialism in other countries had got over its long crisis and succeeded in consolidating people, as people I mean, made them freer, more secure, spiritually stronger, taught them what work can and should imply, set their personalities in action, inspired them to take responsibility. For our part, we were still ahead in materialist terms, so that should have been the moment for implementing others’ best practice. But something entirely different happened. Things developed along a different course. Are you finding this hard to follow?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Here, we were so dazzled by our own superiority, so full of blind faith in the results of what was called practical politics, to put it crudely, we thought we’d managed to reconcile, virtually fuse, Marxism with plutocracy and that socialism would make itself redundant, something that reactionary theoreticians had in fact predicted years before. And that was when they started changing the party programme. They simply ditched the sections that were seen as a threat to the Accord. Step by step, they backed away from nearly all their central principles. And at the same time, in the wake of all this general mumble, the moral reactionaries broke through. You see what I’m driving at?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘What they were attempting to do was to bring all the different points of view closer to each other. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad notion, but the methods that were being used to realise it were built almost entirely on hushing up any antagonism and difficulty. They lied away the problems. They glossed over them with constant improvements in material standards, and hid them behind a fog of meaningless talk pumped out via the radio, press and TV. And the phrase that covered it all was, then as now, ‘harmless entertainment’. The idea was, of course, that the contained infections would heal themselves over time. It didn’t happen. The individual felt physically looked after but robbed of his spiritual autonomy; politics and society became diffuse and incomprehensible; everything was acceptable but nothing was interesting. The individual reacted with bewilderment and gradually growing indifference. And at the bottom of it all there was this indefinable terror.

  ‘Terror,’ the man went on. ‘I don’t know what of. Do you?’

  Jensen looked at him without expression.

  ‘Maybe simply of living, as always. The absurd thing was, superficially everything just went on getting better. There were only three blots in the copybook: alcoholism, the suicide rate and the downward curve on the birth-rate graph. It wasn’t considered proper to mention those, and it still isn’t.’

  He fell silent. Inspector Jensen said nothing.

  ‘One piece of Accord reasoning that permeated everything, even if it was never said aloud or put down in writing, was that everything had to make a profit. And the remarkable thing was that this very doctrine was the fundamental reason for the trade union movement and the party selling us to what we perceived at the time as the arch-enemy. So the motive was simply money, not that they wanted to be rid of our outspokenness and radicalism. That was a bonus they only discovered later.’

  ‘And that made you bitter?’

  The man did not seem to catch the question.

  ‘But that wasn’t the most excruciating and humiliating thing about it all. Even worse was the fact that it was all done without our knowledge, at a level high above our heads. I suppose we’d imagined we were of some significance, and what we said and what we represented and the group we represented meant at least something, at least enough for us to be considered worth telling about their plans for us. But no. The whole thing was settled in private between the chairman of the group and the leader of the union movement, by two businessmen at a conference table. Then the Prime Minister was informed, and the party, which sorted out some of the practical details. Those among us who were better known or in leading positions were shoved away into sinecures in the administration, and the rest of us went, too, as part of the deal. Well, the least important ones got the sack, of course. I was in the middle category. That was what happened, that time. It could just as well have been the Middle Ages. Because that’s the way it’s been done, through the centuries. And it showed us, the ones who worked there, that we meant nothing and couldn’t do a thing. That was the worst thing. It was murder. The murder of an idea.’

  ‘And that made you bitter?’

  ‘More like resigned.’

  ‘But you felt hatred for your new workplace? For the group and its management?’

  ‘No, not at all. If you think that, you’ve misunderstood me. They’d only acted entirely logically, from their own point of departure. Why should they forgo such an easy triumph? Imagine if General Miaja had rung Franco during the siege of Madrid and said, “Would you like to buy my planes? They use too much fuel.” Does that analogy help you at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not really adequate, anyway. Well, I can give you an unambiguous answer to your question, at any rate. No, I didn’t feel hatred for the publishing house, not then, and nor did I later. I was well treated there.’

  ‘But they fired you?’

  ‘Humanely, mark you. And I brought it on myself.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I deliberately abused their trust: that’s the phrase.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I was sent abroad last autumn to gather material for a series of articles. They were going to be about a life, one man’s route to riches and success. The man in question was an internationally famous TV star, the kind the people are continually force-fed with. That was what they kept me busy with all these years, writing rose-tinted, doctored biographies of famous people. But that was the first time they sent me to another country to do it.’

  He smiled his wan smile and drummed his fingers on the edge of the table.

  ‘This man, this celebrity, happened to have been born in a socialist country, one of the most studiously overlooked, in fact. I don’t think our government has acknowledged its existence.’

  He gave Inspector Jensen a sad, searching look.

  ‘Do you know what I did? I used the assignment as the basis for a detailed and largely positive analysis of the political and cultural standards of that country, compared to ours. The articles weren’t published, of course, and I hadn’t expected them to be.’

  He paused briefly and frowned. Then he said:

  ‘The funny thing is, I still don’t know why I did it.’

  ‘Bravado?’

  ‘That’s not inconceivable. But still, I haven’t spoken about all these things for many years. I don’t know why I’m doing it now, in fact. I don’t think they’ve even crossed my mind. I lost heart within a couple of weeks of starting at the publishing house, and then I just sat there writing what they wanted, page after page of it. At the beginning they were obviously more worried about me than they needed to be. Then they realised I wasn’t a threat and could be turned into a useful little cog in the big machine. But to start with there was talk of transferring me to the Special Department. Maybe you don’t know what they do there?’

  ‘I’ve heard it mentioned.’

  ‘It’s also called Department 31. It’s viewed as one of the most important. I don’t know why. You seldom hear anything about it; its work is kept very hush-hush. I’m pretty sure it works on projections of some kind: a dummy group is the slang term for it, in the profession. A move there was on the cards for me at one stage, but then I suppose they saw that all I was fit for was fabricating nice, pretty life stories for well-known people. And they were right.’

  He fiddled absent-mindedly with his coffee cup.

  ‘Then all of a sudden I went and did that. My God, it caught them on the hop.’

  Inspector Jensen nodded.

  ‘You see, I’d realised I wouldn’t ever write any mor
e, and it dawned on me that I couldn’t bear the last thing I wrote to be some rose-tinted, tear-jerking pack of lies about that lout, a piece of flattery for a clown who earns millions from looking gross and not being able to sing, and who goes round the world causing scandals in gay brothels.’

  ‘The last thing you wrote?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve stopped. I’d known for a while that I’d written all I was going to and wouldn’t be able to produce any more. Eventually I’m going to find some entirely different line of work, anything at all. It might not be very easy, because we journalists don’t really know how to do anything. But it’ll be okay; these days, nobody needs to know how to do anything.’

  ‘What do you live on?’

  ‘The publishing house treated me very kindly. They said they knew I was burnt out, gave me four months’ salary and let me go straight away.’

  ‘And they even gave you a diploma?’

  The man looked at Jensen in surprise.

  ‘Yes, farcically enough. How did you know?’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘It doesn’t exist any more. I’d like to say I tore it into tiny pieces and scattered them from the thirtieth floor but prosaically enough, I just threw it away before I left the building.’

  ‘Did you crumple it up?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been able to get it in the bin otherwise. It was quite a size, as I recall. Why do you ask?’

  Inspector Jensen asked four further questions.

  ‘Is this your permanent address?’

  ‘As I told you before, I’ve lived here ever since the flats were built, and I’m planning to stay for as long as there’s still electricity and running water. In a way it’s better than before. There are no neighbours, so you don’t notice how thin the walls are.’

  ‘Why is the Special Department called Department 31?’

  ‘Its rooms are on the thirty-first floor.’

  ‘Is there one?’

  ‘Yes, in the attic, between the editorial offices for the comics and the roof terrace. The lifts don’t go that far.’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘No, never. Most people don’t even know it exists.’

  Before they parted, the man said: